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) cloud. Users can launch Web CFDDFC on a range of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances, including the latest generation with Intel and AMD processors, C6i and C6a, with 64 and 96 physical cores in a single instance, respectively. Web CFDDFC includes a command line interface (CLI) to manage instances, transfer CFD cases to and from instances, run OpenFOAM applications and connect via the browser desktop.
Web CFDDFC Product Details
Web CFDDFC is a pay-as-you-go Amazon Machine Image (AMI) available from AWS Marketplace. It provides a full desktop environment with graphical applications, accessible through a web browser using the NICE DCV remote desktop (see below), including:
- OpenFOAM v10 released by the OpenFOAM Foundation, produced and maintained by CFD Direct;
- ParaView v5.6.0 for data visualization;
- OpenMPI v4.1.4 with support for Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for HPC workloads;
- FreeCAD v0.20.1 parametric 3D CAD modeler;
- … running on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS GNU/Linux operating system.
Instance Types
EC2 includes Compute Optimized instances for compute-intensive workloads. The latest generation of instances, C6i, C6a include largest instance types, c6i.32xlarge and c6a.48xlarge, providing 64 and 96 physical cores in a single instance, respectively. For CFD calculations requiring more cores, the instance types support Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) as standard which provides high throughput, low latency networking required for running a cluster of instances effectively. They also support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), an additional network interface for cluster HPC applications running on the largest instance type in the family.
Configuration for Web CFDDFC
We provide comprehensive instructions to setup Web CFDDFC on AWS, including a free connection test for network and browser security. Users can then choose between launching Web CFDDFC using the AWS console or using the CFDDFC CLI. The CLI includes its own configuration instructions through the config command. The configuration specific to Web CFDDFC, involving a small configuration within AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), is described by running:
cfddfc config -web
Launching Web CFDDFC using the CLI
The Web CFDDFC variant of CFD Direct From the Cloud is launched using the CLI using the -web option, e.g.
cfddfc launch -web -instance c5n.18xlarge -type demand
This launches Web CFDDFC on a c5n.18xlarge instance with 36 cores in the user’s default region using on-demand pricing. Once launched, login credentials are produced to connect to the instance via the browser desktop by typing the following command (optionally with -key to specify the instance).
cfddfc browser
The initial instance could be joined by secondary instances to form a cluster by running the cluster command (optionally with -key to specify the instance), e.g.
cfddfc cluster -secondary 4
This would create a cluster of the main instance and 4 secondary instances of the same type (c5n.18xlarge), providing 5 instances × 36 cores = 180 cores.