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Gromacs Installation

Zhe Shen edited this page Sep 24, 2020 · 6 revisions

Reference: http://manual.gromacs.org/current/install-guide/index.html

Note: All the installation tutorials in this page are for Gromacs 2020.3 and Ubuntu 18.04

Prerequisites

Make sure gcc, g++ and cmake are installed on your machine.

Download Package

Download Gromacs 2020.3 from http://manual.gromacs.org/documentation/2020.3/download.html using wget.

Install Gromacs with GPU and CUDA support

Follow the steps in Quick and dirty installation on official documentation. For the cmake step, add CUDA related arguments such as

cmake .. -DGMX_BUILD_OWN_FFTW=ON -DREGRESSIONTEST_DOWNLOAD=ON -DGMX_GPU=ON -DCUDA_TOOLKIT_ROOT_DIR=/usr/local/cuda

Differences may exist depending on your CUDA toolkit path.

Install Gromacs with MPI cluster support

Follow Quick and dirty cluster installation on official documentation:

On a cluster where users are expected to be running across multiple nodes using MPI, make one installation similar to the above, and another using -DGMX_MPI=on and which is building only mdrun, because that is the only component of GROMACS that uses MPI. The latter will install a single simulation engine binary, i.e. mdrun_mpi when the default suffix is used. Hence it is safe and common practice to install this into the same location where the non-MPI build is installed.

So first install a quick and dirty version, then in the same build directory, build with

cmake .. -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=mpicc -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=mpicx -DGMX_MPI=on -DGMX_BUILD_MDRUN_ONLY=ON
make
make check
sudo make install

To run gromacs process, refer to http://manual.gromacs.org/current/user-guide/mdrun-performance.html. An example:

mpirun -np 2 -mca btl_tcp_if_include weave -x NCCL_SOCKET_IFNAME=weave --host localhost,worker1 gmx_mpi mdrun -deffnm md_0_1

Note the network interface should be specified in the command such as weave, ens33, etc. Type ifconfig to check network interfaces.

Enable direct access to Gromacs commands

With default setting, we need to run source /usr/local/gromacs/bin/GMXRC to activate Gromacs commands for a new ssh session. To make life easier, add . /usr/local/gromacs/bin/GMXRC.bash at the beginning of your mpiuser's ~/.bashrc file.

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