CFD Direct From the Cloud: Run on Microsoft Azure

Getting Started with CFDDFC on Azure

Microsoft Azure 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 Virtual Machines (VMs) with data storage from Azure Disk Storage. Azure Active Directory and Azure Resource Manager helps manage access to services and Azure Blob Storage can provide longer-term data storage at a lower cost.

Computing with VMs

Azure provides computing resources in the form of virtual servers — the virtual machines, or VMs — which can be used to run CFD. A selection of VM types are available with various combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity. The Compute-Optimised (F-series) and High Performance Computing (H-series) VMs are best suited to CFD due to their high performance processors. The F-series VMs use Intel Haswell, Broadwell, Cascade Lake and Skylake (Platinum 8171M) processors, with the Fsv2-series includeing Intel Skylake (Platinum 8168) processors. The H-series VMs include the Intel Haswell E5-2667 processor; the HB-series VMs cluster multiple AMD EPYC processors, with and HBv2 using the EPYC 7002 series.

CFD Direct From the Cloud™

CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC®) provides a fully configured VM Image in the Azure Marketplace to boot VMs running Ubuntu GNU/Linux. The CFDDFC VM images include the latest version of OpenFOAM, with Scotch and OpenMPI for parallel processing.

Steps to run OpenFOAM on Azure

Further Information on CFDDFC on Azure