This document forms the reports and deliverables for the Distributed CSE Support project to provide the OpenFOAM toolbox functionality to HECToR users, and to analyse its performance via benchmarking.
OpenFOAM is an open-source toolbox for computational fluid dynamics [1]. It consists of a set 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 a wealth of: solvers, to simulate specific problems in engineering mechanics; utilities, to perform pre- and post-processing tasks ranging from simple data manipulation to visualisation and mesh processing; and libraries, to create toolboxes that are accessible to the solvers/utilities, such as libraries of physical models. OpenFOAM has support for parallel operation, via MPI.
The goals of the project were to
Ultimately the aim was to make OpenFOAM available for researchers to use on HECToR along with the relevant performance information. Ideally, this will present the machine 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, in a more timely fashion.
All work described in this report was undertaken by the author as part of this dCSE project, unless otherwise stated.