CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC) — our established platform for running OpenFOAM, ParaView and supporting software in the cloud — is now available on C5 and M5 instances of AWS 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.
C5 Instances
The C5 instances use 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors, with 36 physical cores in the largest single instance (c5.18xlarge). Each C5 instance comes with 4GiB memory per physical core. Therefore, with 0.5 million cells per GiB, one C5 instance could run a simulation with up to 72 million cells.
M5 Instances
The M5 instances use 2.5 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors, with 48 physical cores in the largest single instance (m5.24xlarge). Each M5 instance comes with 8GiB memory per physical core. Therefore, with 0.5 million cells per GiB, one M5 instance could run a simulation of up to 192 million cells.
High Performance Networking and Storage
C5 and M5 instances use Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and NVM Express (NVMe), providing high throughput, low latency interfaces for networking and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
Changes to Versions and the Command Line Interface
In order for CFDDFC to support C5 and M5 instances, its Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) must support ENA. Therefore, we created new versions, 5.2 (default) and 4.2, based on OpenFOAM versions 5 and 4 respectively, with ENA enabled. All previous versions, based on AMIs without ENA support, have been deprecated.
We updated our command line interface for CFDDFC for the new versions 5.2 and 4.2. Version 5.2 is selected by default, but version 4 can be launched with the “-image-name 4” command line option.