Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is widely used in the engineering community to simulate all kinds of fluid flow phenomena, be it just fluid flow, or be it in a multi-physics scenario coupled with other physics solvers like e.g. with Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of material behavior (like in an airplane wing design), or even more complex fluid-structure-electrical simulation of a living heart. We just published a new compendium of 11 Cloud CFD case studies using open-source solver OpenFOAM or enhanced (partially commercialized) versions of OpenFOAM, summarizing HPC Cloud Simulation projects which we have performed together with the engineering community over the last years.
|
Team 62: Cardiovascular Medical Device Simulations with OpenFOAM |
Our very first OpenFOAM project in the Cloud was about Cardiovascular Medical Device Simulations and took place in 2013 already. By then we already performed 60 cloud based CAE experiments with engineers all over the world. But about 30 of them showed disappointing results for reasons like lack of transparent information security, unpredictable costs, lack of easy, intuitive self-service registration and administration, incompatible software licensing models, too high expectations, and the reliability and availability of resource providers in those early days. These reasons were discussed in detail already in 2013 in Bio-IT World.
|
Team 183: Turbomachinery CFD fan compressible meridional average pressure. |
In 2015, based on our experience gained from the previous cloud simulation experiments, we reached an important milestone when we introduced our UberCloud HPC software containers based on Docker container technology. Use of these containers shortened project times dramatically, from an average of three months in the early days to just a few days, today. Containerization drastically simplifies access, use and control of HPC resources, applications, and data, whether on premise or remotely in any cloud. Essentially, users are working with a powerful remote desktop in the cloud that is as easy and familiar to use, like their regular desktop workstation. Users don’t have to learn anything about HPC, nor system architecture, nor cloud, for their projects. This approach will inevitably lead to the increased use of HPC for every engineer’s daily design and development, even for novice HPC users.
Now you can download the Compendium of OpenFOAM Cloud CFD case studies HERE.