Getting Started with CFDDFC on AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides pay-as-you-go cloud computing with a broad set of products including compute, data storage, databases, etc. CFD primarily uses secure computing capacity provided by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with data storage from Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps manage access to services and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) can provide longer-term data storage at a lower cost.

Computing with EC2

Amazon EC2 provides computing resources in the form of virtual servers — known as instances — which can be used to run CFD. A selection of instance types are available with various combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity. The Compute-Optimised (C-series) and HPC-Optimised (HPC-series) instance types are best suited to CFD due to their high performance processors. C and HPC-series instances include the following CPUs.

For further Information, see:

CFD Direct From the Cloud™

CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC®) provides a fully configured Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to boot instances on EC2 running Ubuntu GNU/Linux. The CFDDFC AMIs include the latest version of OpenFOAM, with Scotch and OpenMPI for parallel processing. Users can choose between CFDDFC for instances with x86 processors (Intel and AMD) and CFDDFC (Arm) for Arm-based instances:

  • CFDDFC (x86), with secure remote desktop access to a full graphical environment with ParaView visualization and FreeCAD.
  • Web CFDDFC (x86), with secure remote desktop via a browser to the same graphical environment as above.
  • CFDDFC (Arm) for batch running at a lower on-demand cost.

Availability across AWS Regions

CFDDFC is available in the following AWS regions:

  • Americas: us-east-1, us-east-2, us-west-1, us-west-2, sa-east-1, ca-central-1
  • EMEA: eu-central-1, eu-central-2, eu-west-1, eu-west-2, eu-west-3, eu-south-1, eu-south-2, eu-north-1, af-south-1, me-central-1, me-south-1, il-central-1
  • Asia-Pacific: ap-southeast-1, ap-southeast-2, ap-southeast-3, ap-southeast-4, ap-south-1, ap-south-2, ap-northeast-1, ap-northeast-2, ap-northeast-3, ap-east-1

Steps to run OpenFOAM on AWS

Step 1: Register an AWS Account

and subscribe to CFDDFC — it’s free and only takes a few minutes

Setup AWS

Step 2: Launch an Instance of CFDDFC

using the AWS console and connect to the instance

  Run CFD  

Step 3: Use the Command Line Interface (CLI)

to manage instances, transfer case data and run CFD

   Use CLI   

Further Information on CFDDFC on AWS