You are in the wrong place. These are the FAQ for IT issues, concerning how to install the engine. If you have already installed it and have issues running calculations you should go here for hazard calculations and here for risk calculations.
It depends on your use case and your level of expertise. Most of our users are scientists with little IT experience and/or little support from their IT departments. For them we recommend to buy a very powerful server and not a cluster, which is complex to manage. A server with 256 GB of RAM and 64 real cores is currently powerful enough to run all of the calculations in the GEM global hazard and risk mosaic. If you have larger calculations and IT expertise, for a cluster setup see the hardware suggestions and cluster pages.
If you are running the OpenQuake Engine on a multi-node cluster you should also have a look at FAQ related to cluster deployments.
Disabling hyperthreading is recommended since it will save memory. Suppose for instance that you have a laptop with a powerful i9 processor and 16 GB of RAM. It seems a lot. In reality it is not. The operating system will consume some memory, the browser will consume a lot of memory, you may have other applications open and you may end up with less than 10 GB of available memory. If hyperthreading is enabled the engine will see 10x2 = 20 cores; running parallel computations may easily consume 0.5 GB per core, i.e. 10 GB, so you will run out of memory. With hyperthreading disabled you will still have 5 GB of available RAM.
Note: on a linux machine you can try disable hyperthreading
temporarily with the command sudo echo off > /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control: however, this setting will not survive a reboot. Also, on some
systems this command will not work. If you cannot disable hyperthreading
just make sure that if you have enough memory: we recommend at least
2 GB per thread.
Some users reported this issue. It is due to a limitation of Python
multiprocessing module on Windows. In all cases we have seen, the
problem was solved by disabling hyperthreading. Otherwise you can
reduce the number of used cores by setting the parameter num_cores
in the file openquake.cfg as explained below.
This is another way to save memory. If you are on a single machine, the way to do it is to edit the file openquake.cfg and add the lines (if for instance you want to use 8 cores)
[distribution]
num_cores = 8
If you are on a cluster you must edit the section [zworkers] and the parameter
host_cores, replacing the -1 with the number of cores to be used on
each machine.
If you are on a laptop, the first thing to do is close all memory consuming applications. Remember that running the enigne from the command-line is the most memory-efficient way to run calculations (browesers can use significant memory from your laptop). You can also limit the number of parallel threads as explained before (i.e. disable hyperthreading, reduce num_cores) or disable parallelism altogether. If you still run out of memory, then you must reduce your calculation or upgrade your system.
Help! Is it possible to configure multiple installations of the engine to run independently on the same computer?
Yes, it is possible, as long as their virtual environments are stored in different directories and the ports used by their dbservers are different.
When you install the engine using the install.py script,
you may specify the --venv parameter to choose in which directory the engine
virtual environment must be stored. On an existing installation of the engine,
you can run the command
$ oq info venv
to retrieve the path of its virtual environment.
Another parameter accepted by the install.py script is --dbport, that
specifies the port number used by the engine dbserver. By default, the port is
set to 1907 for server installations or 1908 for user installations. The port
can be customized through the attribute port of section [dbserver] in the
configuration file openquake.cfg, placed inside the virtual environment
directory, e.g.:
[dbserver]
port = 1907
The oqdata directory, that stores calculation data, can safely be shared
between two different instances of the engine working on a same computer. Each
HDF5 dataset is independent from all others in the datastore and it has a unique
identifier. It is possible to determine the version of the engine that produced
each HDF5 file (calc_<calc_id>.hdf5) using the command
$ oq show_attrs / <calc_id>
where / indicates the root attributes (date, engine_version, etc.)
and <calc_id> (an integer number) is the
calculation identifier. In case the calculation id is not specified, the
attributes are retrieved for the latest calculation.
The OpenQuake Engine has several installation methods. To choose the one that best fits your needs take a look at the installation overview.
Binary packages are provided for Windows. For all other systems use the universal installer. We also provide Docker containers.
A 64bit operating system is required. Please refer to each OS specific page for details about requirements.
MPI is not supported by the OpenQuake Engine. Task distribution across network interconnected nodes is done via zmq. The worker nodes must have read access to a shared file system writeable from the master node. Data transfer is made on TCP/IP connection.
MPI support may be added in the future if sponsored by someone. If you would like to help support development of OpenQuake, please contact us at [email protected].
Support for Python 2.7 has been dropped. The last version of the Engine compatible with Python 2.7 is OpenQuake Engine version 2.9 (Jeffreys).
When the OpenQuake Engine is driven via the oq command over an SSH connection an associated terminal must exist throughout the oq calculation lifecycle.
The openquake.engine.engine.MasterKilled: The openquake master lost its controlling terminal error usually means that the SSH connection
has dropped or the controlling terminal has been closed having a running computation attached to it.
To avoid this error please use nohup, screen, tmux or byobu when using oq via SSH.
More information is available on Running the OpenQuake Engine.
The default port for the DbServer (configured via the openquake.cfg
configuration file) is 1908 (for a development installation) or 1907
(for a package installation).
The OpenQuake Engine may require lot of disk space for the raw results data (hdf5 files stored in /home/<user>/oqdata) and the temporary files used to either generated outputs or load input files via the API. On certain cloud configurations the amount of space allocated to the root fs (/) is fairly limited and extra 'data' volumes needs to be attached. To make the Engine use these volumes for oqdata and the temporary storage you must change the openquake.cfg configuration; assuming /mnt/ext_volume as the mount point of the extra 'data' volume, it must be changed as follow:
shared_dirmust be set to/mnt/ext_volume- A
tmpdir must be created in/mnt/ext_volume custom_tmpmust be set to/mnt/ext_volume/tmp(the directory must exist)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Users/openquake/py36/bin/oq", line 11, in <module>
load_entry_point('openquake.engine', 'console_scripts', 'oq')()
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/commands/__main__.py", line 53, in oq
parser.callfunc()
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/baselib/sap.py", line 181, in callfunc
return self.func(**vars(namespace))
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/baselib/sap.py", line 251, in main
return func(**kw)
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/commands/engine.py", line 210, in engine
exports, hazard_calculation_id=hc_id)
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/commands/engine.py", line 70, in run_job
eng.run_calc(job_id, oqparam, exports, **kw)
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/engine/engine.py", line 341, in run_calc
close=False, **kw)
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/calculators/base.py", line 192, in run
self.pre_execute()
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/calculators/scenario_damage.py", line 85, in pre_execute
super().pre_execute()
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/calculators/base.py", line 465, in pre_execute
self.read_inputs()
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/calculators/base.py", line 398, in read_inputs
self._read_risk_data()
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/calculators/base.py", line 655, in _read_risk_data
haz_sitecol, assetcol)
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/calculators/base.py", line 821, in read_shakemap
oq.discard_assets)
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/hazardlib/shakemap.py", line 100, in get_sitecol_shakemap
array = download_array(array_or_id)
File "/Users/openquake/openquake/oq-engine/openquake/hazardlib/shakemap.py", line 74, in download_array
contents = json.loads(urlopen(url).read())[
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/urllib/request.py", line 223, in urlopen
return opener.open(url, data, timeout)
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/urllib/request.py", line 526, in open
response = self._open(req, data)
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/urllib/request.py", line 544, in _open
'_open', req)
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/urllib/request.py", line 504, in _call_chain
result = func(*args)
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/urllib/request.py", line 1361, in https_open
context=self._context, check_hostname=self._check_hostname)
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/urllib/request.py", line 1320, in do_open
raise URLError(err)
urllib.error.URLError: <urlopen error [SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed (_ssl.c:852)>Please have a look at /Applications/Python 3.8/ReadMe.rtf for possible solutions. If unsure run from a terminal the following command:
sudo /Applications/Python\ 3.8/install_certificates.command # NB: use the appropriate Python version!If you need help or have questions/comments/feedback for us, you can subscribe to the OpenQuake users mailing list: https://groups.google.com/g/openquake-users