[lakeat]

Hi,

I am planning to buy a mac and run openfoam and program with cpp, qt and vtk, anybody is using a macbook air? How is it? Comparing to mac-pro, is the screensize TOO small, is it TOO slow?

If Air's okay, it's going to save me 500 bucks. (Im not using it for heavy simulation, I have my own clusters in the office, it will be just used for testing and developing)

My major concern and what I am worrying about is that mac-air is too slow for even moderate-size case (like 1 million grid points), I saw its video card not that good. So I am worrying if I need to develop some qt and vtk code.

Any experiences?
Thanks a lot,

[mturcios777]

If you are not runing simulations, you should be fine with the Air. Post-processing data is where it could get tricky. From the experience of other users on the forum, getting OF to work on a Mac is possible but not easy.

When you say you want to run OpenFOAM but not simulate, how do you mean? Will you be acessing your cluster from SSH?

[sail]

What exactely do you mean for using Openfoam?

i'd say the air (but i might have doubts even with the pro) is too slow for meshing and postprocessing anything but the simplest cases.

for developement and testing i'd say it's ok, given you won't need excessive resources.

to use it to connect via ssh or any remote conecction is ok as well. I use my android phone for that.

[lakeat]

Thank you all, i have edited my original post a little bit so to make it more clear.

I would just use it for doing some test simulation, I am not looking forward to a fast simulation speed.

I heard that compiling vtk is painful on mac, and I also heard that parafoam can not work directly... but I am not entirely sure

[gschaider]

Originally Posted by lakeat

Hi,

I am planning to buy a mac and run openfoam and program with cpp, qt and vtk, anybody is using a macbook air? How is it? Comparing to mac-pro, is the screensize TOO small, is it TOO slow?

If Air's okay, it's going to save me 500 bucks. (Im not using it for heavy simulation, I have my own clusters in the office, it will be just used for testing and developing)

My major concern and what I am worrying about is that mac-air is too slow for even moderate-size case (like 1 million grid points), I saw its video card not that good. So I am worrying if I need to develop some qt and vtk code.

Any experiences?
Thanks a lot,

I'd say Pro. But for different reasons than speed and screensize:

- Harddisk: have a look at how much disk space a OpenFOAM-installation uses on a Linux-installation (with the .o-files - which are not there if you installed a binary) and then think how much other stuff except OF you want to install. For instance you'll need a compiler
- Memory: during compilations of the packages you've mentioned anything below 4Gig can be a bit painful