Attention
WARNING: From 8am on 30th June until 5pm on 4th July 2025, there will be no access to the Stanage HPC cluster.
We will try to minimise this downtime and it is possible that Stanage will return to service before 4th July. We will notify you by email when Stanage is back online and available for job submission.
CASTEP
CASTEP is a leading code for calculating the properties of materials from first principles. Using density functional theory, it can simulate a wide range of properties of materials proprieties including energetics, structure at the atomic level, vibrational properties, electronic response properties etc. In particular it has a wide range of spectroscopic features that link directly to experiment, such as infra-red and Raman spectroscopies, NMR, and core level spectra.
Licensing
Castep is free for academic use.
Interactive Usage
After connecting to Stanage (see Establishing a SSH connection), start an interactive session with the following command:
srun --pty bash -i
Castep can be made available by running:
module load CASTEP/23.1-intel-2022a
Castep has multiple executables that carry out various calculations and procedures. To list them all you will need to list its been directory. In the case of version 23.1 this can be by typing
ls /opt/apps/testapps/el7/software/staging/CASTEP/23.1-intel-2022a/bin
Please note majority of the exucatables require srun to run, so can only be run as a batch job. This is demonstrated in the next section.
Batch Submission - Parallel
The parallel version of CASTEP is called castep.mpi. Below is an example of a parallel castep.mpi batch job. It follows the example documented on the official castep tutorial .
#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --mem=5G
#SBATCH --time=00:30:00
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=4
#Email notifications to me@somedomain.com
#SBATCH --mail-user=me@somedomain.com
#Email notifications if the job fails
#SBATCH --mail-type=FAIL
#SBATCH --job-name=matlab_par_test
module load CASTEP/23.1-intel-2022a
srun --export=ALL castep.mpi graphite
srun --export=ALL orbitals2bands graphite
Installation Notes
These are primarily for system administrators.
Version 23.1
The non-GPU installation was done using the custom easyconfig CASTEP-23.1-intel.eb. This will also be submitted to the official easybuild config github.
Testing
Version 23.1
The none GPU installation was tested using the example batch scripts and the instructions listed on official castep tutorial .