CST Studio

CST Studio#

SIMULIA CST is enterprise software some lab members & collaborators use for 3D EM simulation and for coil design.

Using CST Studio#

Prerequisite#

First, check that CST Studio is installed on the server you want to use:

$ which cst
/usr/local/bin/cst

If the output looks like above, you’re good to go!

CST Studio 2025 is currently installed on

  • tassan

Running#

CST Studio runs in a Podman container under a special user. You can access a shell inside this container using the script cst:

p122326@ge.polymtl.ca@tassan:~$ cst
[cst@tassan CST_Studio_Suite_2025]$

Once in the container, you can run CST commands:

[cst@tassan CST_Studio_Suite_2025]$ ./cst_design_environment

Accessing files from CST container#

You can make files available to the podman container by placing them in /home/cst/files. The files will then be available inside the container at the path /files:

[cst@tassan CST_Studio_Suite_2025]$ ./cst_design_environment --r --m --hide /files/test_one_port.cst

Note: since all NeuroPoly members can run commands inside the CST container, it is theoretically possible for any NeuroPoly user to access data in /files. If this is unacceptable for PII reasons, please contact an admin or open an issue in the computers repo.

A note on disk space#

CST Studio files can be very large. Please clean up files once you’re done using them.

Hardware acceleration#

CST Studio doesn’t currently support the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture on tassan. However, you can bypass the standard compatibility checks using the CST_HWACC_ALLOW_UNVERIFIED_HARDWARE flag:

p122326@ge.polymtl.ca@tassan:~$ cst
[cst@tassan CST_Studio_Suite_2025]$ CST_HWACC_ALLOW_UNVERIFIED_HARDWARE=1 ./cst_design_environment

To set the flag for the entire session:

p122326@ge.polymtl.ca@tassan:~$ cst
[cst@tassan CST_Studio_Suite_2025]$ export CST_HWACC_ALLOW_UNVERIFIED_HARDWARE=1
[cst@tassan CST_Studio_Suite_2025]$ ./cst_design_environment --r --m --hide --withgpu=1 /files/test_one_port.cst
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