Starting up a CFD lab
 

Hi Guys,
this is my first post and instead of saying hello I am asking for help, so selfish of me :o
We are setting up a CFD laboratory in our mechanical engineering department. So I would appreciate any generic advice on the topic and specifically regarding the PC and server configurations, the operating system and any relevant freeware (say like Octave).
We are planning to go for a total of 36 machines with one of them acting as the dedicated server for Ansys 12.0 and MATLAB. So, the other 35 machines would be only running the client installations.
We currently have licenses for MATLAB, Solidworks, Ansys 12.0 (20 academic and 5 commercial)
As far as the OS goes, I am myself partial to Linux (Ubuntu rocks :) ) but all the licenses we have are for Windows machines. Still, could anyone advise me if it would be better to go with Linux on say 5-10 machines for creating a computation cluster. Any advice on how to create and use a cluster would be valuable to me considering I am a novice at it. (I will look over the dedicated Hardware discussion forum to, but just had to post this query here for a wider audience)
Thank you,
a.

Hi,

In our lab we have 7-10 machines which run linux, though we have a local server, file server and then clients. I have configured the file server and the machines with Debian installed in all the machines. This is to enable anybody in any other system, which makes people unbiased to sit on a particular system. I have used NFS server and client to do this.

u can also use Kerberos (protocol) for such systems, as we dont use any other software apart from opensource software in our lab we did not have much of issues of licensing and we do core cfd programming in our lab.

Hi Ramesh,
thanks for your insightfull reply. We already had planned a server, but ur file server idea on a linux system is brilliant. Thanks
Would you mind sharing what kind of PC configuration you guys use?

a.

Hi

we have two workstations(quad core duo with 16 gb ram each ) and 2 core 2 duo with 2gb ram machines with 3 pentium 4 with 2 gb ram machines......... and my file server is one of the pentium machine....

NFS is very easy to install and maintenance in Linux, u can use either Debian or Ubuntu for that

Thanks Ramesh for all your help and directions.
Please do let me know if you think up of anything else or have any other advice.