OpenFOAM

OpenFOAM is the free, open source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software developed primarily by OpenCFD Ltd since 2004. It has a large user base at commercial and academic organizations across many areas of engineering and science. OpenFOAM has an extensive range of features to solve anything from complex fluid flows during chemical reactions, turbulence and heat transfer, to acoustics, solid mechanics, and electromagnetics.

OpenFOAM includes many functions and tools and can be used to carry out many different types of analyses. Therefore the workflow catalog includes a template for a specific analysis rather than a more generic template. In our case we use the canonical OpenFOAM motorbike tutorial which calculates the steady flow of air around a motorbike and its rider.

This workflow template can:

execute all the individual steps of the motorbike tutorial as Fuzzball jobs. In particular, it runs single process tasks surfaceFeatureExtract, blockMesh, and decomposePar. Next, meshing (using snappyHexMesh) and topoSet are run using a configurable number of CPU cores. Initial conditions for the simulation are set followed by another series of parallel tasks which include patchSummary, potentialFoam, checkMesh, and the simulation which executes solver simpleFoam. Finally, the mesh and partitions of the decomposed model are reconstructed using reconstructParMesh and reconstructPar respectively.
optionally save the results to a persistent volume and/or AWS S3
optionally start a Paraview server at the end of the workflow. You can connect to this server with your local Paraview client to visualize the results of the simulation.

The following sections will walk you through: