OpenFOAM on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
 

Has anyone experience in running Open FOAM on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)?

EC2 HPC instances announced!
 

Not yet, but Amazon just announced their HPC EC2 instances today! Let's get cracking team!

Opensource CFD on Amazon EC2
 

Hi guys,

actually the CFD/FEA oriented distro CAELinux has been ported to Amazon EC2 infrastructure, so now you can run OpenFOAM or Code-Saturne jobs in MPI using EC2 infrastructure.

CAELinux contains also a long list of pre/post processors like Salome, GMSH, Netgen, EnGrid, Discretizer as well as Paraview. And other CFD solvers like Code-Saturne, Gerris or Elmer plus a number of FE solvers like Code-Aster, Calculix or Impact.

For more information please look at http://www.caelinux.com

Hi Joel,

I adore your work on CAELinux, however unfortunatly you leave out OpenFOAM 1.5-dev, this leads to lack of features like GGI, RBF, viscoelastic fluids etc. http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ope...n-1-7-0-a.html

But it would be easy to offer both (1.5-dev&1.7.x) versions so the users can dicide
startOF15dev / startOF17

alias startOF15dev='source /usr/lib/OpenFOAM-1.5-dev/etc/bashrc'
alias startOF17='source /usr/lib/OpenFOAM-1.7.x ....'
ready to use debian packages of 1.5-dev can be found at https://launchpad.net/~cae-team/+archive/ppa

thx
elvis

Hi Elvis,

thank you for your feedback, I did not know that openfoam 1.5 dev had so many improvement compared to vanilla 1.7.

I will try to integrate both in the next release of CAELinux!

OpenFOAM on Amazon EC2 - A simple test of performance
 

I thought I would share my experience with OpenFOAM on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

I have just tested the performance of Amazon's “High-CPU Extra Large Instance”, and compared the performance to my own cluster. I know my comparison below is not excatly scientific, but maybe you could enjoy it as a bedtime story. :-)

This Amazon instance used has: 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units* (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform.

I am running a 40+ nodes ROCKS cluster build partly from old Pentium 4@3GHz machines, generally with 1GB RAM, 32-bit platform. My cluster nodes is connected through a 100Mbit network. (Nothing fancy here)

I have tested the performance with an OpenFOAM (1.6 / 1.7) simulation based on my own solver (related to the icoFoam solver). My computational domain holds approximately 800,000 elements.

In my test I used two nodes i my cluster and used the Hyper-treathing of the Pentium 4 to have 4 threads total. On my AMI (Amazon Machine Image) I tested with 1,2,4 and 8 of the virtual cores in this instance. Results are normalized to 1 for the AMI @2 core case. Here are my results: (Inverse of the time spent, i.e. smaller i better)

AMI @ 1 core = 1.51 (slow)
My cluster @ 2x2 threats = 1.14
AMI @ 2 cores = 1.0
AMI @ 4 cores = 0.87
AMI @ 8 cores = 0.83 (faster)

As seen there is not much speedup when using more than 2 cores. This could be related to the limited size of the problem(?). My cluster setup is far from ideal. My network is slow, and all data is stored on a NAS accesses through this network. Hence I would have expected more speedup from my cluster to Amazon. I am a little disappointed.

With that being said I am very impressed with the Amazon EC2 service. It found I quite easy to; register, choose an available AMI, modify it to my needs (install my own solver etc), create a new AMI and store it in my newly created Amazon S3 bucket, register my AMI, and finally run the AMI on an instance type of my choice. Sweet!

Hint: If you want to get started. 1. Search google/youtube for a basic tutorial 2. Register to Amazon AWS, than EC2 and S3. 3. When starting an instance search for OpenFOAM. There is AMI's with OpenFOAM already installed.

I have yet to test the Amazon Cluster instances, perhaps they will perform better.

Has anyone else tested OpenFOAM on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)?

Kind regards

Jens Johansson

*http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What...u_introduce_it : “One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.”

There is a SourceForge project dedicated to the "Cloud Computing for OpenFOAM (R) users" - CloudFlu

Corresponding documentation could be found at http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/cloudflu page

Problem in accessing the ami-8f5761fb
 

Hi,
Did anyone succeed in connecting the AMI ami-8f5761fb ?
- I use putty and winscp for data transfer.
- Using puttygen I converted the keypair file.pem to .ppk format.
- This file path was set to putty and specfied the DNS server name to the sessions ( obtained form amazon console once the instance started to run.)

PUTTY is not connecting to the server. The whole window is blank. After sometime it says connection timed out... However I am able to connect to OPENSUSE AMI by the same method without any problem.

Could anyone give some hint ??

Thanks

Hi Maruthamuthu,
I see your problem in the way you are trying to connect to this AMI - from Windows, not Linux.
My suggestion is, that you had better use Linux (as it was initially supposed by OpenCFD) to interact with this AMI.
To do so in Windows you can use Linux running under VirtualBox (or something of that sort).

P.S. Of course, it is possible to find the real problem - the question is in how much time you are willing to spend for it. When you use Linux & VirtualBox - the time is predictable at least.

Best regards,
Alexey

Has anyone had any success with EC2 yet? I'm interested in testing it out, but I'm having the same problem as maruthamuthu in that I can't seem to connect to my running instance (ami-8f5761fb). Unlike maruthamuthu, I am using Linux, but I'm using version 10.04 as opposed to the machine image using 10.10, so I guess that could be the problem.

Hi Kevin

I am also using ubuntu 10.04. And I can see a lot of available AMIs in my browsers but also couldnt find ami-8f5761fb. The problem shouldnt come from the local linux system. Did u solve the problem? Thanks

Hi Kaifu

I'm afraid not. But don't let that discourage you too much. I'm a novice when it comes to both Linux and EC2, and I sort of got away from the CFD field before I spent too much time on this issue.

I've run OpenFOAM jobs on Rescale - I'm not sure who their cloud provider is, but I found their service to be pretty fast and easy to use.

Does anyone knows, if it is possible to compile his own modifications in the openfoam, or more general to compile the openfoam from scratch?
I am asking for Europe region.

Thanks

[Edit] I will appreciate if someone could pass info about cloud services for large openfoam cases.

CFD Direct From the Cloud
 

CFD Direct have released CFD Direct From the Cloud: a pre-configured Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for creating instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

It contains the latest version of OpenFOAM, ParaView, scotch, etc running on the latest long-term-support version of Ubuntu, with the option of connecting via remote desktop.

See: http://cfd.direct/cloud