It is 4 years since OpenFOAM co-founders Henry Weller and Chris Greenshields launched CFD Direct with Jenya Collings to oversee the maintenance of OpenFOAM, on behalf of the OpenFOAM Foundation, and provide services to users of OpenFOAM. We summarise below our principal activities for our 4th year ending March 2019.
Development
We undertook 1074 man-hours of new developments, with 731 code commits to the public development line of OpenFOAM (OpenFOAM-dev). Customer projects funded ∼45% of the work, leaving 590 hours unfunded. New developments ranged from simplified case setup for heat transfer, improvements to arbitrary mesh interface (AMI) for rotating geometry, and further improvements to tools for productive CFD.
Maintenance
We completed 993 man-hours of maintenance work, including resolving 315 issues on the Issue Tracking Site and undertaking redesign and major repair in critical areas, e.g. AMI. Unresolved issues fell by 17%, demonstrating our continued commitment to sustainable development of OpenFOAM. The work was supported by maintenance funding, although 113 hours were still unfunded.
OpenFOAM Foundation
We continually manage the OpenFOAM Foundation, the copyright holder and licensor of OpenFOAM, to ensure it is distributed free and open source only. It provides a focal point for the supporters of OpenFOAM, including the organisations who fund OpenFOAM through Maintenance Plans and individuals who contribute developments and maintenance. We did 680 hours unpaid work for the Foundation including:
- actively promoting Sustainable Development of OpenFOAM, in particular by organising the OpenFOAM Open Day 2018;
- packaging the development line,
OpenFOAM-devweekly for Ubuntu, other Linux distributions, Windows 10 and macOS; - producing the major OpenFOAM v6 release and subsequent v6 patch releases, accompanied by release notes and documentation;
- managing open source licensing issues, e.g. the OpenFOAM Foundation Contributor Agreement and enforcement;
- publishing the openfoam.org website and the subdomain websites for Issue Tracking, Source Guide and Downloads.
Contribution to OpenFOAM
In total, CFD Direct contributed 1383 man-hours of (unfunded) work in-kind to OpenFOAM, for the benefit of its users. This an increase back to the levels of 2017, which is not sustainable. The increase was (ironically) largely due to the organisation and participation of the Open Day to promote sustainable development and the need for maintenance funding.
Training
We ran 60 days of OpenFOAM Training, updated for OpenFOAM v6, with our Essential CFD, Applied CFD, Programming CFD and Cloud CFD courses. Courses were delivered as Classroom Training in London, Berlin, Munich, Houston, and Chicago; Virtual Training; and, On-Site Training, including hybrid classroom-virtual courses in London and Chicago, enabling us to host participants in person and remotely.
Cloud
CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC) provides a turnkey platform including OpenFOAM v6 and related software, running in the cloud. We continued to develop the command line interface (CLI), notably adding functionality to launch a cluster of instances. The total usage of CFDDFC increased to ∼1.3 million core-hrs of AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). It offers low cost of running CFD in the cloud by using cheaper, spare capacity with EC2 Spot Instances, and provides cost estimates for instances and data transfer. We have enabled high performance computing with OpenFOAM using Amazon EC2 C5n instances, delivering 70%-90% scaling at 504 cores at an “entry” price in the order of $100.