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LAMMPS Windows Installer Repository
This repository is hosting pre-compiled Windows installers of the
LAMMPS
molecular dynamics simulation software package.
The binaries are built with MinGW64 Linux to Windows
cross-compilers on Fedora Linux using the standard LAMMPS sources.
The LAMMPS binaries contain all optional packages included in
the source distribution except:
- ADIOS (requires an external library),
- H5MD (requires an external library),
- KIM (not fully ported to Windows),
- ML-PACE (available as plugin),
- ML-QUIP (not fully ported to Windows),
- MSCG (requires an external library),
- NETCDF (requires an external library),
- PLUMED (not fully ported to Windows),
- QMMM (only useful when linking to a QM software),
- SCAFACOS (requires an external library).
- VTK (requires an external library).
The
serial executable additionally does not contain the
MPIIO and
LATBOLTZ packages, since those require
MPI-IO functions, which are not available without linking
to a real MPI library.
Starting with the 17 February 2022 version of LAMMPS the KOKKOS package with the serial
and OpenMP backends enabled is included. GPU support for Kokkos is currently not possible
for these packages due to compiling the binaries with a cross-compiler.
Starting with the 24 March 2022 version of LAMMPS the PLUGIN package is included.
Plugin packages for additional LAMMPS packages
As of LAMMPS version 23 June 2022, we have started to provide add-on installer
packages that contain LAMMPS packages as plugins. Those are separate packages because either
their source code is not part of the LAMMPS distribution or uses and external library with
licensing terms that prohibits linking the package into the LAMMPS executable and library directly.
There are two variants of the plugin packages: one with support for MPI and one without.
The corresponding LAMMPS installer packages have the PLUGIN package included and are set up to automatically
load such plugins immediately at runtime as shown in the picture to the right.
The following packages are currently available as plugin installer packages:
The
LAMMPS Python module (to call LAMMPS from
Python) is included in
all packages in a way, that it
should work with a suitable Python installation of your own,
since a LAMMPS shared library (i.e. a DLL file on Windows) is
included.
The
PYTHON package (to call Python from LAMMPS)
however, is only included in the installer package with Python
in the name. Those packages also include a full Python runtime
environment with all standard Python modules and the NumPy
module since those have to be consistent with the Python library
used to compile LAMMPS. Please note that the 64-bit Windows
NumPy module is considered
very experimental and thus one
should expect crashes that are not bugs in LAMMPS.
Important Notes on Changes to the Installer packages
As of LAMMPS version 27 May 2021, the LAMMPS installer packages will detect
if LAMMPS (version 27 May 2021 or later) has already been installed and will
offer to uninstall, in case it is. This should be independent from whether
it was 32-bit or 64-bit version and with or without MPI or Python. Having
multiple versions/variants of LAMMPS installed at the same time is no longer
supported. Also, the name of the LAMMPS executable has been simplified to
lmp.exe in all packages since there is no longer a need to
differentiate between the MPI and non-MPI version.
As of LAMMPS version 17 February 2022, only 64-bit versions of the LAMMPS
installer packages will be built and provided. If you must have a 32-bit
version, you need to use an older version of LAMMPS or compile LAMMPS from
source. Compiling LAMMPS on Windows with Visual Studio 2022
(available
cost-free as Community Edition) is supported.
Some Notes on GPU Support
These Windows binaries include GPU acceleration via the
GPU package.
This is achieved through compiling the GPU package in OpenCL mode and linking
to an
OpenCL
compatible ICD loader. The included OpenCL loader library is compatible
with OpenCL version 1.2 to 3.0. This means the executables do not contain
any vendor provided code and should be compatible with current GPUs from
AMD,
Intel,
and
Nvidia.
You need to have an HD or UHD GPU in an 8th generation or later core
architecture Intel CPU for Intel GPU OpenCL support. Intel Xe type
GPUs are not supported since they support single precision only.
The GPU package has been compiled for mixed precision computation and
as of LAMMPS version 10 March 2021 will automatically tune itself for
the OpenCL capable hardware in use.
In the case of having multiple Vendor provided OpenCL runtimes
installed, you may run into the situation of the "wrong" runtime
being set as the default and used by LAMMPS. In this case, you may
need to remove unwanted vendors from the windows registry database. Look for the
key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Khronos\OpenCL\Vendors
,
and remove vendors with non-functional OpenCL support.
When reporting problems, please always include the exact
version of the installer and the output of the
ocl_get_devices
tool.
LAMMPS Python module
These Windows binaries are built to include a shared library
(liblammps.dll) and and also contain the LAMMPS Python wrapper
module which is placed in a directory included in
the
PYTHONPATH environment variable. That makes it
possible to import it into a suitable Python interpreter on
Windows without any additional setup. This has been tested with
the Python interpreters bundled with
Microsoft Visual Studio
and those downloaded from
python.org but should be usable with any Python interpreter that
is for the same architecture (32-bit or 64-bit x86).
This module is always included and the packages with a Python
runtime include may import the LAMMPS python module from within their
Python functions or classes. However, the LAMMPS installer packages
do not include a Python executable for standalone use.
LAMMPS Shell
These Windows packages also include the
LAMMPS Shell,
a customized LAMMPS executable enhanced for interactive use.
Winget package manager support
Starting with version 23 June 2022 the non-MPI versions of the installer packages
are also available for Windows 10 and Windows 11 using the
Winget Windows Package Manager
for convenient installation, uninstallation, and updates from the command line.
Installing LAMMPS on Windows
There are installer packages for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows available.
As of LAMMPS version 17 February 2022, only 64-bit versions of the LAMMPS installer
packages will be built and provided. If you must have a 32-bit version, you need to
use an older version of LAMMPS.
The respective download directory will contain installer
packages that are labeled with the date of the LAMMPS version
and packages labeled as
latest. It is usually
recommended to download and install the latest package.
Installer packages for plugins are also provided and follow
a similar naming scheme.
The other packages are provided in case there is a problem with it.
Download the installer executable suitable for your machine,
execute it, and follow the instructions in the dialogs.
Both kinds of packages contain:
- Either: a regular multi-threaded LAMMPS executable called
lmp
.
This should always work.
- Or: a multi-threaded LAMMPS executable that also
supports parallel execution via MPI message passing. This
executable is called
lmp
and
requires installation of a suitable MPICH2 package to
work.
- the LAMMPS manual in PDF format
- the colvars
reference manual in PDF format
- several additional PDF format guides for specific packages or styles
- the potential files bundled with the LAMMPS source code
- most of the example inputs, reference outputs and related files
- the benchmark inputs and reference outputs
- the tools
binary2txt, chain, msi2lmp, abf_integrate,
createatoms, ocl_get_devices, lammps-shell, stl_bin2txt
The executables will run in serial when executed directly.
Please see below for instructions on how to perform parallel runs.
MPI Support for LAMMPS on Windows
To use the MPI based parallelism in the provided installer packages, you also need to install
a specific version of MPICH2 from Argonne lab.
This is a very old version of MPICH for Windows but it is required for these binaries.
For 32-bit Windows you have to download and install
mpich2-1.4.1p1-win-ia32.msi. This is the latest available binary 32-bit
MPI package compatible with the GNU cross compilers used to compile LAMMPS.
Correspondingly, for 64-bit Windows you have to download and install
mpich2-1.4.1p1-win-x86-64.msi. This is the latest available binary 64-bit
MPI package compatible with the GNU cross compilers used to compile LAMMPS.
For Windows 10 and 11 it may be required to first enable support for .NET 3.5 and older
in the Windows settings dialog for optional Windows features of the Control Panel.
There are more recent versions of MPICH ported to Windows by Microsoft, but they are not
compatible with the packages here. Also it is not possible to use those packages with the
GNU cross-compilers. Instead to use these newer MPI packages you would have to compile
LAMMPS from source on Windows yourself using the Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 software.
We do not provide precompiled packages created natively on Windows because fewer packages
support it and the process of building such packages on Windows has not been sufficiently
automated and tested.
Installing LAMMPS globally on Windows with administrator privilege
The installer packages listed above will install LAMMPS into a user's
personal storage area and thus it cannot be used by all users. This behavior
was changed with the stable release of LAMMPS in October 2020.
Installer packages from previous LAMMPS versions and current versions that
require administrator privilege to be installed can be found
their own download area.
The content is otherwise the same, only the packaging is different.
Running LAMMPS on Windows
General Comments
LAMMPS is a text mode program, so you have to click on the
Command Prompt entry in the windows start menu, launch the
Windows Power Shell, or simply execute the command
cmd
from Start -> Run.
The LAMMPS manual and the colvars reference manual in PDF format
are linked from the start men, also references to open the
file system browser to view the Benchmarks and Examples
directory tree. The PATH environment variable is automatically
set by the installer, so that the bundled executables from everywhere
in the system. Also the LAMMPS_POTENTIALS environment variable
is preset to the folder with the bundled manybody potential files,
so they do not need to be copied into the respective working directory.
Serial Execution
To run a LAMMPS simulations please open a console window as outlined above
and change to the directory with your input script and then run
lmp
as described in the LAMMPS
manual. For more details and additional command line flags, please
check out the
LAMMPS Manual.
Multi-threaded Parallel Execution
All LAMMPS binaries from this repository support multi-threading via OpenMP,
however by default only one thread is enabled. To enable more threads, e.g. four,
you need to either set it at the command line prompt via
set OMP_NUM_THREADS=4
, via the
-pk omp 4
command line flag, or via the
package omp 4
command in your input script.
After enabling the use of multiple threads, you also have to select
styles in LAMMPS, that are multi-thread enabled. Those are usually identified
by the /omp suffix. Those can be selected explicitly and selectively,
or with the
suffix
command or - most conveniently - via using the -sf omp
command line flag to the LAMMPS executable.
Example: lmp -pk omp 4 -sf omp -in in.melt
Message Passing (MPI) Parallel Execution
Only the executable from the LAMMPS-MPI packages supports parallel execution
via MPI (which can be combined with OpenMP multi-threading). For that you also
need to install a specific version of MPICH2 from Argonne lab linked above.
The installer does not contain it and does not check for it. Please note, that
you need to download a very specific (and rather old) version of the MPICH
package, as this is what LAMMPS was compiled with and the latest available
Windows binary version compatible with the GNU compilers used to compile LAMMPS.
After the installation of the MPICH software, it needs to be integrated into the system.
For this you need to start a Command Prompt in Administrator Mode (right
click on the icon and select it). Change into the MPICH2 installation directory, then
into the subdirectory bin
and execute
smpd.exe -install
.
MPI parallel executables have to be launched with mpiexec -localonly # lmp ...
or mpiexec -np # lmp ...
with "#" being then number
of parallel processes to start. For the latter you may be asked for your password.
Known Issues: while running in MPI parallel mode any
output to the screen is block buffered and not line buffered as
usual. That is, output will not show up immediately, but only
after a certain amount of output has accumulated. This is done for
efficiency reasons. Multi-threaded parallel or serial runs are
not affected. Also when running under mpiexec, you should not use
multi-threading since MPICH restricts processes to a single
physical CPU thus it will run less efficient.
Last modified: Sun Sep 18 14:24:45 UTC 2022 by akohlmey