AudiLab SoftwareAudiLab SoftwareCode_Aster has been developed under the leadership of EDF (Électricité de France) R&D since 1989. It is developed mainly for Unix and is distributed under the GPL licence. Some ports exist for Microsoft Windows (ref).
Code_Aster itself has no GUI but it comes with two GUI applications: astk, a management and control interface (document U1.04.00), including eficas, a command-file editor; and STANLEY, a post-processor (document U4.81.31). Code_Aster can also be used within Salome-Meca, which is a bundle of Code_Aster with Salome. The latter is a cross-platform, open-source, generic pre- and post-processor for numerical simulation, which can be used by itself or as a ‘platform for integration’. ParaView is integrated into Salome as the ParaViS module.
| Machine-translated | Correct English | French |
|---|---|---|
| bookstore | library | librairie |
| car | auto | auto |
| defect | default | defaut |
| grid | mesh (ref) | maillage |
| hollow | sparse | creuse |
| house | home-built | maison |
| it even | the same | le même |
| maillor | mesher | mailleur |
| mesh | mesh element (ref) | maille |
| nodes tops | end nodes | nœuds sommets |
| of more | also | de plus |
| soups | consumed | consommés |
Very extensive documentation (~20 000 pages) and training material is available on the Code_Aster Web site. It is written in French and the official English version is translated by machine. There is a better English version by Biswajit Banerjee (ref).
Beginning with Code_Aster by Jean-Pierre Aubry (local copies of 2013 and 2019 editions) is in English, and includes the use of Gmsh and (to a much lesser extent in the 2019 edition) Salome.
The student-produced documentation by Syllignakis (supervised by Vosynek) and these tutorials may also be useful.
There is an active forum.
Our Fad finite-element preprocessor can
export .mail files and primitive .comm files
for use with Code_Aster.
Note that Code_Aster's .med files are binary files in
HDF format; they can be manipulated using the
tools
in the Debian hdf5-tools package.
Fad cannot currently import or export .med files, but it can
import the .dat geometry files that Salome-Meca can export.
[2015 Apr]
Download aster-full-src-11.7.0-1.noarch.tar.gz (or
an equivalent) from
www.code-aster.org.
Use gunzip and tar to unpack the downloaded file.
Read the README file.
Follow the various links for information about the different
versions and about prerequisite software,
including
Installation of prerequisites wiki page.
(In addition to the things listed there, the installer checks for a
number of other things, many of which are probably installed in most
cases. In my case, the following are still flagged as missing: nedit, geany,
gvim, gdb, dbx, ladebug & cmake.)
Use Python to start the installation.
If installing in the directory recommended by Aubry,
do sudo mkdir /opt/aster/ and
sudo chown username:username /opt/aster. Or specify a user directory with --prefix.
Packages libblas-dev and liblapack-dev
are needed.
[2011 Jan]
Download SALOME-MECA-2010.2-LGPL-x86_64.tgz (or
an equivalent) from
http://www.code-aster.org ▶
Download ▶ Salome-Meca
to, say, ~/Downloads64/.
Do
tar xzf SALOME-MECA-2010.2-LGPL-x86_64.tgz
cd SALOME-MECA-2010.2-LGPL-x86_64/postinstall
python postinstall.py
You may receive warnings about DSCCODE GUI
and PAL GUI resources; I don't know what they
mean, and so far they don't seem to have caused problems.
Run Salome-Meca with the runSalomeMeca script
in the installation directory.
If you want to add it to the GNOME launch panel, specify
the as
.
The file icon_default.png in
SALOME/SALOME5/V5_1_4/GUI_V5_1_4/share/salome/resources/gui/
makes a good icon.
The above procedure worked fine for me under Debian Lenny. Under Ubuntu Lucid, Salome-Meca runs but actual simulations die quietly without doing anything, apparently due to missing libraries.
There are multiple ways of performing the following steps. I've shown the ‘long’ ways, using the menus, but often a judicious right-click or icon click can also be used.
.mail and .comm files from Fad.
.comm file as required.
.med file: run ASTK.
.mail file.
.comm file.
For , select
from drop-down
list; in the Object Browser, select the mesh object at the second level
of the hierarchy; click on the bent-arrow button.
Document D0.03.01 describes the general architecture of Code_Aster. The manual is dated 2010; even so, Section 4 on the execution supervisor starts by saying that it needs to be profoundly revised because the supervisor, written in Fortran, had a long time before been rewritten in Python and greatly extended.
The SRC directory contains 10 subdirectories:
lrmast to read
Aster format (.mail), lrmhdf to read .med format