There are several methods available to interactively termination an running LS-DYNA job. They are briefly discussed here.

1. Sense Switch ‘SW1’
This command is typed by first typing ‘Control-C’ followed by ‘SW1’. This causes LS-DYNA to terminate gracefully by writing all the information from memory to the file system.

2. Creating a file ‘D3KIL’ in the working directory
By simply ‘touching’ (ex. touch file_name in a unix environment) a file named ‘D3KIL’ in the running directory, LS-DYNA will behave as in step 1 above. In addition, any of the sense-switch controls can be included in the first line as shown below.

sw4


3. Fast Termination using the sense switch control ‘STOP’
This is one of my favourite ways of stopping a large job as it completely skips the dumping of data and exits very quickly.

4. Using Process Id of the LS-DYNA Job
For jobs that are submitted via a load scheduler such as OpenPBS, PBSPro or LSF, it is difficult to interact directly with the job. In such cases, you can issue a kill signal -2 such as one below. It is extremely important to have a file as in step 2 above such that it can extract the sense-switch from the file ‘D3KIL’ or the file named ‘switch’. In the case of multiple processor job, the first master pid can be used.

kill -2 lsdyna_process_id