VASP¶

VASP is a package for performing ab initio quantum-mechanical molecular dynamics (MD) using pseudopotentials and a plane wave basis set. The approach implemented in VASP is based on a finite-temperature local-density approximation (with the free energy as variational quantity) and an exact evaluation of the instantaneous electronic ground state at each MD step using efficient matrix diagonalization schemes and an efficient Pulay mixing.

Access¶

VASP is available only to NERSC users who already have an existing VASP license. If you have a VASP license, send your license information to the VASP support at Vienna at vasp.materialphysik@univie.ac.at (and copy vasp_licensing@nersc.gov) requesting that they confirm your VASP license to NERSC staff at vasp_licensing@nersc.gov in order to gain access to the VASP binaries at NERSC.

It may take several business days from the date when your confirmation request is sent to the VASP support at Vienna to you actually gain the access to the VASP binaries provided at NERSC. If the confirmation takes longer than 5 business days update the initial email thread with the license information.

When your VASP license is confirmed, NERSC will add you to a unix file group: vasp5 for VASP 5 and vasp for VASP 4. You can check if you have the VASP access at NERSC or not by typing the groups command. If you are in the vasp5 file group, then you can access both VASP 5 and VASP 4; if you are in the vasp file group, then you can access the VASP 4 only.

Modules¶

To see what versions of vasp are available:

nersc$ module avail vasp

The vasp modules generally define two important environment variables when loaded PSEUDOPOTENTIAL_DIR and VDW_KENRAL_DIR which are the locations of the pseudopotential inputs and the vdw_kernel.bindat file used in dispersion calculations.

Vasp binaries¶

Where possible each version provides:

• vasp_gam - gamma point only build
• vasp_ncl - non-collinear spin
• vasp_std - the standard binary

However, some older versions of the vasp module provide:

• gvasp - gamma point only build
• vasp_ncl - non-collinear spin
• vasp - the standard binary

Examples¶

Basic¶

Edison¶

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -qos=debug
#SBATCH --time=00:30:00
#SBATCH --nodes=2
#SBATCH --tasks-per-node=24

module load vasp
srun vasp_std

Cori Haswell¶

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -qos=debug
#SBATCH --time=00:30:00
#SBATCH --nodes=2
#SBATCH --tasks-per-node=32
#SBATCH --constraint=haswell

module load vasp
srun vasp_std

Cori KNL¶

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -qos=debug
#SBATCH --time=00:30:00
#SBATCH --nodes=2
#SBATCH --core-spec=2
#SBATCH --tasks-per-node=66
#SBATCH --constraint=knl

module load vasp/5.4.4-knl
srun vasp_std