With restricted access to the workplace, CFD engineers can be excluded from their usual place of work. They find themselves without familiar tools, like the ubiquitous personal computer tucked away under the desk.
- Q: How can the engineer stay productive, delivering CFD analyses, repeatedly, to a defined standard in good time?
- A: By quickly switching to remote CFD using CFD Direct From the Cloud™ and by learning effective CFD.
CFD Direct From the Cloud™
CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC®) is a turnkey system providing OpenFOAM and supporting software running in its native Linux environment. It is available as a Marketplace Product for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which operates almost half of all public cloud infrastructure. The key features of CFDDFC are:
- Once setup on AWS, CFD engineers can launch remote instances (virtual machines) in 2 minutes.
- Instances include compute optimized (C-family) with up to 48 cores.
- 100s of cores with clusters of instances, with linear scaling at 1000 cores with C5n instances and Elastic Network Adapter.
- Free Trial on low capacity instances with AWS Free Tier for new account holders.
- Connection to instances through the remote desktop (see below), available for Linux, Windows and macOS.
- Simple management, deployment and use of instances using the
cfddfccommand line interface. - Cost-effective, leveraging unused capacity with spot instances, the default with
cfddfc. - From the co-founders/producers of OpenFOAM for the OpenFOAM Foundation.
Customised CFD
CFD Direct can maintain customised versions of CFDDFC, providing customers a fully automated CFD solution on demand. The CFD capability can be developed over time and fully maintained to provide immunity to “that person left” syndrome. CFD can then become a standard analysis technique, run by non-experts.
Our customer, Big Ass Fans, has sales staff running hundreds of automated simulations per week from a custom analysis tool — a great success story described in the first keynote speech at AWS re:Invent 2019.
CFD Direct From the Cloud (CFDDFC) was also a talking point in the first keynote at @awscloud #ReInvent, from 28:25 https://t.co/COy1TLQ5JP pic.twitter.com/JvVOOAsx30
— CFD Direct OpenFOAM (@CFDdirect) December 27, 2019
Learn Effective CFD
At the same time the CFD engineer starts using CFDDFC, they can also become more productive by learning effective CFD through OpenFOAM Training. We have unrivalled experience in OpenFOAM Training with instructor, Chris Greenshields (OpenFOAM co-founder) pioneering OpenFOAM Training since 2008 and building tools for productive CFD.
Courses are currently all scheduled as Virtual OpenFOAM Training so CFD engineers can take the training from the safety and comfort of their home. Training is delivered by video conference between the instructor and participants who work on engineering CFD problems through remote desktop with CFDDFC — giving participants a taste of CFD on AWS. All machines are accessible to the instructor who can then assist with any problems the participant experiences.
The cost of a single course could be equivalent to 1-2 weeks of payroll cost of a CFD engineer, 2% of a single core, commercial CFD licence or 1% of a 3 year research project grant.