CFD Direct From the Cloud: Run OpenFOAM on AWS EC2

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.

Intel CPUs: C5 (Skylake-SP), “new” C5 (Cascade Lake), C5n, (C5 with higher network performance), C6i (Ice Lake), C6in, C7i (Sapphire Rapids)
AMD CPUs: C5a (2nd-gen EPYC), C6a (3rd-gen EPYC), HPC6a, C7a (4th-gen EPYC), HPC7a.
Arm-based: C6g (Graviton 2), C6gn (C6g with higher network performance), C7g (Graviton 3), C7gn (Graviton 3E), HPC7g.

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, ca-west-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-southeast-5, ap-south-1, ap-south-2, ap-northeast-1, ap-northeast-2, ap-northeast-3, ap-east-1

Steps to run OpenFOAM on AWS

CFDDFC® v11 Released

CFD Direct announces the release of version 11 of CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC®), available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace as the standard CFDDFC product, Web CFDDFC and CFDDFC (Arm). Standard CFDDFC v11 includes OpenFOAM v11, ParaView v5.10, OpenMPI v4.1.5 and FreeCAD v0.20, running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Web CFDDFC has the same software running on Ubuntu 22.04. CFDDFC (Arm) is server-only including OpenFOAM v11 and OpenMPI v4.1.5, running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. CFDDFC and Web CFDDFC run on single instances with up to 96 cores on Intel C7i instances (c7i.48xlarge) or C6a AMD instances (c6a.48xlarge) or in clusters with of instances up to 1000 cores or more.

Web CFDDFC® Released

CFD Direct is pleased to announce the release of Web CFD Direct From the Cloud (CFDDFC®), providing OpenFOAM via a remote desktop in a web browser, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Web CFDDFC is a pay-as-you-go Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from AWS Marketplace, providing a full desktop environment with graphical applications, including OpenFOAM v10, ParaView v5.6.0, OpenMPI v4.1.1 and FreeCAD v0.19.2, running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Web CFDDFC runs on single instances with up to 64 C6i Intel cores (c6i.32xlarge) or 96 C6a AMD cores (c6a.48xlarge), and in clusters with with good parallel scaling on clusters of instances up to 1000 cores.

CFDDFC® v10 Released

CFD Direct is pleased to announce the release of version 10 of CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC®), available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace as the standard CFDDFC product and CFDDFC (Arm). Standard CFDDFC v10 includes OpenFOAM v10, ParaView v5.6.0, OpenMPI v4.1.1 and FreeCAD v0.19.2, running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. CFDDFC (Arm) is server-only including OpenFOAM v10 and OpenMPI v4.1.1, running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. CFDDFC runs on single instances with up to 64 C6i Intel cores (c6i.32xlarge), 96 C6a AMD cores (c6a.48xlarge) or 64 C7g Graviton cores (c7g.16xlarge) and in clusters with with good parallel scaling on clusters of instances up to 1000 cores.

CFDDFC on AWS C6i/M6i

CFD Direct From the Cloud (CFDDFC®) is our established platform for running OpenFOAM, ParaView and supporting software using cloud computing. CFDDFC is now available on AWS C6i and M6i instances of Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). These instances use the 32-core 2.9 GHz (3.5 GHz with turbo-boost) Intel Xeon Platinum 8375C (Ice Lake) processor. With 2 processors per socket, the largest single instances, c6i.32xlarge and m6i.32xlarge, includes 64 cores. C6i and M6i instances run at up to 50 Gbps of network speed at the largest instance size, which also supports Elastic Fabric Adapter to provide high speed networking across a cluster of instances.

CFDDFC® v9 Released

CFD Direct from the Cloud 9 Remote Desktop

CFD Direct is pleased to announce the release of version 9 of CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC®), available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace as the standard CFDDFC product and CFDDFC (Arm). Standard CFDDFC v9 includes OpenFOAM v9, ParaView v5.6.0, OpenMPI v4.1.1 and FreeCAD v0.19.2, running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. CFDDFC (Arm) is server-only including OpenFOAM v9 and OpenMPI v4.1.1, running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. CFDDFC runs on single instances with up to 48 C5 Intel cores (c5.24xlarge) or 64 C6 Arm-based cores (c6g.16xlarge) and in clusters with with good parallel scaling on clusters of instances up to 1000 cores.

AWS HPC Competency 2021

CFD Direct Limited has become one of the first approved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partners to achieve High Performance Computing (HPC) Competency status. This designation recognises that CFD Direct has demonstrated deep experience helping customers optimise their computational fluid dynamics (CFD) workloads on AWS. Using CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC®), engineers and scientists can launch instances, pre-configured with OpenFOAM, in minutes — with up to 48 processors and clusters of 100s of processors.

CFDDFC (Arm) for AWS C6g

CFD Direct has launched CFDDFC® (Arm), a marketplace product on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with OpenFOAM. CFDDFC (Arm) is a variant of CFD Direct From the Cloud™ for Amazon EC2 instances running Arm-based Graviton2 processors, in particular the C6g instances for compute-intensive workloads. CFDDFC (Arm) operates in server-mode without graphical applications and includes OpenFOAM 7 and OpenMPI 4.0.3 running on Ubuntu Server for Arm 20.04 LTS. For batch CFD jobs with guaranteed access on-demand, users can save 35% on their EC2 costs with C6g instances.

OpenFOAM HPC with AWS EFA

External Aerodynamics of a Vehicle with OpenFOAM

In November 2018, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announed Elastic Fabric Adapter, a network interface for HPC applications running on EC2. We previewed the EFA technology, running benchmark CFD simulations with OpenFOAM, presented previously: (1) strong scaling – 97 m total cells, external aerodynamics around a car; (2) weak scaling – 100 k cells per core, flow over a weir. At 1008 cores, EFA delivered linear scaling in the strong scaling test and ~70% scaling in the weak scaling test. With linear strong scaling, EFA enables faster solutions for the same cost simply by running on more cores. The combination of open source software, C5n instances and EFA provides impressive HPC, at a price accessible to all.

OpenFOAM HPC with AWS C5n

CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC) is a Marketplace Product for AWS EC2, that provides a complete platform with OpenFOAM and supporting software running on Ubuntu Linux. It enables simple, fast creation of a cluster of instances to run CFD with OpenFOAM. We tested Amazon EC2 C5n instances, launched in November 2018, on 2 cases of steady-state, external aerodynamics around a car and transient simulation of water flowing over a weir. With meshes of 50-100 million cells, results showed 70%-90% scaling at 504 cores. The cost of the simulations was in the order of $100, compared to $100,000+ to purchase on-premises hardware and licences of proprietary software.

CFDDFC on AWS C5/M5

CFD Direct From the Cloud (CFDDFC) is our established platform for running OpenFOAM, ParaView and supporting software using cloud computing. CFDDFC is now available on AWS C5 and M5 instances of Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). The CFDDFC product page on AWS MarketPlace now lists CFDDFC versions 5.2 and 4.2, corresponding to versions 5 and 4 of OpenFOAM, respectively. Users who launch CFDDFC with the command line interface should update their installation of CFDDFC immediately.

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CFD Direct

CFD Direct From the Cloud: Run on AWS EC2