Run a workflow¶
In this tutorial, you will use the command line to view all available workflows and their settings. Beginners will also be introduced to remote terminals (SSH) and jobs queue (such as SLURM).
The quick tutorial¶
Danger
we assume you have VASP installed and that the vasp_std
command is in the available path. In the future, we hope to update this tutorial with a workflow that doesn't require VASP or remote Linux cluster. Until then, we apologize for the inconvenience.
- Before running a workflow, we must initialize our Simmate database with
simmate database reset
. Your database will be built at~/simmate/my_env-database.sqlite3
, where "my_env" is the name of your active conda environment. - To practice calculating, make structure file for tablesalt (NaCl). Name it
POSCAR
, where the contents are...Na1 Cl1 1.0 3.485437 0.000000 2.012318 1.161812 3.286101 2.012318 0.000000 0.000000 4.024635 Na Cl 1 1 direct 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 Na 0.500000 0.500000 0.500000 Cl
- View a list of all workflows available with
simmate workflows list-all
- Interactively learn about all workflows with
simmate workflows explore
- View the settings used for the
static-energy.vasp.mit
workflow withsimmate workflows show-config static-energy.vasp.mit
-
Copy and paste VASP POTCAR files to the folder
~/simmate/vasp/Potentials
. Be sure to unpack thetar.gz
files. This folder will have the potentials that came with VASP -- and with their original folder+file names:# Located at /home/my_username (~) simmate/ └── vasp └── Potentials ├── LDA │ ├── potpaw_LDA │ ├── potpaw_LDA.52 │ ├── potpaw_LDA.54 │ └── potUSPP_LDA ├── PBE │ ├── potpaw_PBE │ ├── potpaw_PBE.52 │ └── potpaw_PBE.54 └── PW91 ├── potpaw_GGA └── potUSPP_GGA
-
With everything configured, there are now two ways you can submit your workflow using the command-line. This can be done in the CLI or in python. Here, let's use a settings file in yaml format:
# In a file named "my_example.yaml". # Note, different workflows accept different settings here. workflow_name: static-energy.vasp.mit structure: POSCAR command: mpirun -n 5 vasp_std > vasp.out # OPTIONAL directory: my_new_folder # OPTIONAL
-
Now run the workflow configuration file we just made
simmate workflows run my_example.yaml
-
Once the workflow completes, you will see files named
simmate_metadata.yaml
andsimmate_summary.yaml
which contains some quick information for you. Other workflows (such asband-structure
calculations) will also write out plots for you. -
While the plots and summary files are nice for quick testing, much more useful information is stored in our database. We will cover how to access your database in a following tutorial.
Tip
This tutorial only convers the CLI and YAML input files, but submitting workflows through python or TOML files is covered in the full guides
Tip
Want to customize a specific setting (e.g. set ENCUT to a custom value)? Customizing workflow settings is covered in the "Build Custom Workflows" tutorial. However, try to resist jumping ahead! There are still several important steps to learn before customizing workflows.