Learning Forum

[scorsett]

Hi!

My research group has been using Lumerical in a cluster environment for a few years now. We don't have sudo privileges, and the cluster doesn't have rpm2cpio installed. So, we can't use instructions like the ones here, and instead we've always installed Lumerical by:

1. Locally performing the alien conversion step on this page: https://optics.ansys.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500005392522-Ubuntu-Linux-installation-guide 
2. Uploading the .deb file to the cluster
3. Unpacking the .deb file with a workaround "ar p" command

This has always worked great for us, but we're now trying to upgrade to a 2024 Lumerical version, and we're suddenly getting an alien error, no matter which version we try. We have also tried reinstalling the 2024v2 tar.gz file - no luck.

The error we get is very brief with no details: "Unpacking of 'Lumerical-2024R2-R2-626a190136.el7.x86_64.rpm' failed at /usr/share/perl5/Alien/Package/Rpm.pm line 168."

Line 168 seems to open up and unpack the file for conversion to cpio. I already have the latest version of rpm2cpio installed on my local machine, so it seems like this is potentially an incompatibility issue between some rpms and the latest alien version? 

Has this issue been solved before for Lumerical? (A related line-168 failure post seemed to be solved by following the ./extract-rpm.sh procedure, but that unfortunately won't work for us, since rpm2cpio isn't enabled in the cluster environment.) Could a .deb file potentially be provided alongside the existing .rpm?

Thank you!

[Lito]

@Sabrina Corsetti, 

This is an issue with the new version of cpio on Ubuntu. If you cannot use ./extract-rpm.sh, try to downgrade cpio: 

Ubuntu 20.04:
sudo apt-get install -y --allow-downgrades cpio=2.13+dfsg-2

Ubuntu 22.04:
sudo apt-get install -y --allow-downgrades cpio=2.13+dfsg-7

[scorsett]

Thank you! That solved the file-conversion problem we were having. 
Now, we're running into a new challenge on the cluster. When we attempt to run fdtd simulations using our standard batch files (now running v242 instead of v231), we are getting the error:

"Messages file /ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/language/en-us/ansysli_msgs.xml does not exist."

Based on a forum post for a similar problem, it sounds like this may be due to a licensing issue. Is it possible that existing licenses may not support running v242 in an HPC environment? We should have access to 60 lum_fdtd_solve licenses, but I'm not certain how to check version compatibility.

[Lito]

Hi Sabrina, 

I am glad to hear that the installation issue has been resolved with the downgrading of cpio. 

You an ignore the missing XML message. This will not prevent you from checking out the license from your server and opening/running Lumerical. This simply informs you that it cannot find the specific XML file. 

[scorsett]

Thanks for pointing this out! It seemed at first that simulations wouldn't start after this error message appeared. Turns out we just needed to be more patient - they eventually launched and ran!

[Lito]

You are welcom. If you are running from the command line directly, you will not see the "Running state with the time remaining..." right away since the simulation will initialize, mesh do other calculations before running the actual simulation job. I will be closing this post.