OpenFOAM

Policy

OpenFOAM is produced by OpenCFD Ltd, is freely available and open source, licensed under the GNU General Public Licence.

Description

The OpenFOAM® (Open Field Operation and Manipulation) CFD Toolbox is a free, open source CFD for both commercial and academic organisations. OpenFOAM has an extensive range of features to solve complex fluid flows problems involving chemical reactions, turbulence and heat transfer, to solid dynamics and electromagnetics. It includes tools for meshing, notably snappyHexMesh, a parallelised mesher for complex CAD geometries, and for pre- and post-processing. Almost everything (including meshing, and pre- and post-processing) runs in parallel as standard, enabling users to take full advantage of computer hardware at their disposal.

By being open, OpenFOAM offers users complete freedom to customise and extend its existing functionality. OpenFOAM includes over 80 solver applications that simulate specific problems in engineering mechanics and over 170 utility applications that perform pre- and post-processing tasks, e.g. meshing, data visualisation, etc.

Solver Capabilities

1. Incompressible flows
   
2. Multiphase flows Combustion
   
3. Buoyancy-driven flows
4. Conjugate heat transfer
5. Compressible flows
6. Particle methods (DEM, DSMC, MD)
7. Other (Solid dynamics, electromagnetics)

Parallel Computing

OpenFOAM employs domain decomposition, with its decomposePar utility, to split the mesh and fields into a number of sub-domains and allocate them to separate processors. Applications can then run in parallel on separate sub-domains, with communication between processors with software that uses the MPI communications protocol. While OpenFOAM is shipped with the OpenMPI library, any MPI library, such as those optimised for particular hardware platforms, can be used with OpenFOAM by “plugging” it in through the Pstream interface.

Availability

On flow cluster, we have differents versions of precompiled OpenFOAM, they are available as a module :

$ module av >  grep openfoam 

currently we have :

• openfoam/1.6-ext
• openfoam/1.7.1
• openfoam/2.0.1
• openfoam/2.1.0 
• openfoam/2.1.1
  

note: most of the installed versions of openFOAM are compiled with gcc/4.3.4.

by default,  gcc/4.7.1 is loaded by the cluster software manager. Therfore, you need first to unload gcc/4.7.1 and load gcc/4.3.4

$ module unload gcc/4.7.1

$ module load gcc/4.3.4

it's always good to check if you have load the right modules,

$ module list

$ Currently Loaded Modulefiles:
  1) shared             2) sge/6.2u5p2        3) paraview/3.12.0    4) openfoam/1.6-ext

$ gcc --version 

Usage at flow cluster 

In order to use OpenFOAM, load the openfoam module, example:

$ module load openfoam/1.6-ext

Useful links

• Unofficial OpenFOAM wiki
  
• OpenFOAM User Guide
• Running openFOAM in parallel