11.1. Common problems — LAMMPS documentation

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# 11.1. Common problems

If two LAMMPS runs do not produce the exact same answer on different machines or different numbers of processors, this is typically not a bug. In theory you should get identical answers on any number of processors and on any machine. In practice, numerical round-off can cause slight differences and eventual divergence of molecular dynamics phase space trajectories within a few 100s or few 1000s of timesteps. However, the statistical properties of the two runs (e.g. average energy or temperature) should still be the same.

If the velocity command is used to set initial atom velocities, a particular atom can be assigned a different velocity when the problem is run on a different number of processors or on different machines. If this happens, the phase space trajectories of the two simulations will rapidly diverge. See the discussion of the loop option in the velocity command for details and options that avoid this issue.

Similarly, the create_atoms command generates a lattice of atoms. For the same physical system, the ordering and numbering of atoms by atom ID may be different depending on the number of processors.

Some commands use random number generators which may be setup to produce different random number streams on each processor and hence will produce different effects when run on different numbers of processors. A commonly-used example is the fix langevin command for thermostatting.

A LAMMPS simulation typically has two stages, setup and run. Most LAMMPS errors are detected at setup time; others like a bond stretching too far may not occur until the middle of a run.

LAMMPS tries to flag errors and print informative error messages so you can fix the problem. For most errors it will also print the last input script command that it was processing. Of course, LAMMPS cannot figure out your physics or numerical mistakes, like choosing too big a timestep, specifying erroneous force field coefficients, or putting 2 atoms on top of each other! If you run into errors that LAMMPS does not catch that you think it should flag, please send an email to the developers.

If you get an error message about an invalid command in your input script, you can determine what command is causing the problem by looking in the log.lammps file or using the echo command to see it on the screen. If you get an error like “Invalid … style”, with … being fix, compute, pair, etc, it means that you mistyped the style name or that the command is part of an optional package which was not compiled into your executable. The list of available styles in your executable can be listed by using the -h command-line switch. The installation and compilation of optional packages is explained on the Build packages doc page.

For a given command, LAMMPS expects certain arguments in a specified order. If you mess this up, LAMMPS will often flag the error, but it may also simply read a bogus argument and assign a value that is valid, but not what you wanted. E.g. trying to read the string “abc” as an integer value of 0. Careful reading of the associated doc page for the command should allow you to fix these problems. In most cases, where LAMMPS expects to read a number, either integer or floating point, it performs a stringent test on whether the provided input actually is an integer or floating-point number, respectively, and reject the input with an error message (for instance, when an integer is required, but a floating-point number 1.0 is provided):

    ERROR: Expected integer parameter instead of '1.0' in input script or data file

Some commands allow for using variable references in place of numeric constants so that the value can be evaluated and may change over the course of a run. This is typically done with the syntax v_name for a parameter, where name is the name of the variable. On the other hand, immediate variable expansion with the syntax ${name} is performed while reading the input and before parsing commands,

Note

Using a variable reference (i.e. v_name) is only allowed if the documentation of the corresponding command explicitly says it is. Otherwise, you will receive an error message of this kind:

    ERROR: Expected floating point parameter instead of 'v_name' in input script or data file

Generally, LAMMPS will print a message to the screen and logfile and exit gracefully when it encounters a fatal error. Sometimes it will print a WARNING to the screen and logfile and continue on; you can decide if the WARNING is important or not. A WARNING message that is generated in the middle of a run is only printed to the screen, not to the logfile, to avoid cluttering up thermodynamic output. If LAMMPS crashes or hangs without spitting out an error message first then it could be a bug (see this section) or one of the following cases:

LAMMPS runs in the available memory a processor allows to be allocated. Most reasonable MD runs are compute limited, not memory limited, so this should not be a bottleneck on most platforms. Almost all large memory allocations in the code are done via C-style malloc’s which will generate an error message if you run out of memory. Smaller chunks of memory are allocated via C++ “new” statements. If you are unlucky you could run out of memory just when one of these small requests is made, in which case the code will crash or hang (in parallel), since LAMMPS does not trap on those errors.

Illegal arithmetic can cause LAMMPS to run slow or crash. This is typically due to invalid physics and numerics that your simulation is computing. If you see wild thermodynamic values or NaN values in your LAMMPS output, something is wrong with your simulation. If you suspect this is happening, it is a good idea to print out thermodynamic info frequently (e.g. every timestep) via the thermo so you can monitor what is happening. Visualizing the atom movement is also a good idea to ensure your model is behaving as you expect.

In parallel, one way LAMMPS can hang is due to how different MPI implementations handle buffering of messages. If the code hangs without an error message, it may be that you need to specify an MPI setting or two (usually via an environment variable) to enable buffering or boost the sizes of messages that can be buffered.