Should I partition my hard drive or run OpenFOAM in Virtual Box?

BhaluBear · July 14, 2014, 13:12

I am curious as to how much processing power I will lose if I run OpenFOAM in Virtualbox as opposed to installing Ubuntu through a partition on my hard drive. Are the gains in performance worth the hassle of creating and installing through a partition? Hopefully someone can shed some light on this question. Thanks!

Lieven · July 14, 2014, 14:19

Hi BhaluBear,

The answer to your question really depends on what you want to do with OF. Just to give you an idea, this is my personal view on it:

1) Very light usage (< 10k cells): Virtualbox is probably sufficient

2) Medium usage (10k-100k cells):
I would go for a separate Ubuntu-installation. Else you would be running 2 operating systems + a heavy CFD simulation at the same time and that might be asking a bit much.

3) Heavy usage (> 100k cells):
You probably want to migrate to cluster to do the computations. In this case virtualbox will be sufficient since you will only be using OF for preparing the input files and possibly some post-processing actions (although these might CPU-intensive too!)

And yet... it all depends on the type of pc you have too. If you have 8 or 16 (or more) CPUs available the whole story changes and you probably can do a lot more with the virtualbox. But you need RAM memory as well etc...

So I can't give you a straight forward answer (maybe others can) but I hope this already helps you a bit.

July 14, 2014, 13:12	Should I partition my hard drive or run OpenFOAM in Virtual Box?	#1
BhaluBear New Member Max Join Date: Jul 2014 Posts: 6 Rep Power: 11	I am curious as to how much processing power I will lose if I run OpenFOAM in Virtualbox as opposed to installing Ubuntu through a partition on my hard drive. Are the gains in performance worth the hassle of creating and installing through a partition? Hopefully someone can shed some light on this question. Thanks!

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July 14, 2014, 14:19		#2
Lieven Senior Member Lieven Join Date: Dec 2011 Location: Leuven, Belgium Posts: 299 Rep Power: 22	Hi BhaluBear, The answer to your question really depends on what you want to do with OF. Just to give you an idea, this is my personal view on it: 1) Very light usage (< 10k cells): Virtualbox is probably sufficient 2) Medium usage (10k-100k cells): I would go for a separate Ubuntu-installation. Else you would be running 2 operating systems + a heavy CFD simulation at the same time and that might be asking a bit much. 3) Heavy usage (> 100k cells): You probably want to migrate to cluster to do the computations. In this case virtualbox will be sufficient since you will only be using OF for preparing the input files and possibly some post-processing actions (although these might CPU-intensive too!) And yet... it all depends on the type of pc you have too. If you have 8 or 16 (or more) CPUs available the whole story changes and you probably can do a lot more with the virtualbox. But you need RAM memory as well etc... So I can't give you a straight forward answer (maybe others can) but I hope this already helps you a bit.