The HECToR Service is now closed and has been superceded by ARCHER.

OpenFOAM

This Distributed Computational Science and Engineering (dCSE) project was to port the OpenFOAM open-source toolbox for computational fluid dynamics to HECToR. OpenFOAM consists of generic tools to simulate complex physics for a variety of fields of interest, from fluid flows involving chemical reactions, turbulence and heat transfer, to solid dynamics, electromagnetism and the pricing of financial options. The core technology of OpenFOAM is a flexible set of modules written in C++. These are used to build solvers and utilities to perform pre- and post-processing tasks ranging from simple data manipulation to visualisation and mesh processing.

  • The overall aim of this work was to make OpenFOAM available for researchers to use on HECToR along with the relevant performance information. Ideally, this will present HECToR to a new group of potential users who otherwise would not have considered it as an option, and allow them to undertake larger, more complex simulations, within a timely fashion.

The individual achievements of the project are summarised below:

  • Install and test the core OpenFOAM solvers on HECToR and produce their user tutorials.
  • Benchmark the following OpenFOAM modules; 2D DamBreakFine, 3D Lid-Driven Cavity Flow, 3D DamBreak and 3D Spray. These were identified as useful via UK CFD communities.
  • Recommend the optimum number of cores to run the modules with for a given problem size.
  • Make OpenFOAM available to HECToR users, along with an online how-to guide for using OpenFOAM on HECToR

Please see PDF or HTML for a report which summarises this project.

UPDATE: At present, OpenFOAM versions 2.1.0, 2.0.1 and 1.7.1 are available for both serial and parallel jobs.