Preference: OF 2.1.1 on Mac or Linux?
 

Hello all, and diving right in I'm a complete beginner with OpenFOAM and really looking forward to working with it.

I'm interested if there are any drawbacks to installing OF on Mac 10.6.8 rather than installing Ubuntu on my macbook pro and running OpenFOAM on the Linux partition.

I'm also assuming a machine backup would be in order before starting.

Are there any other considerations you recommend?

Thanks for all your help. This is going to be fun!

I notice that most if not all the commercial clusters run Linux,
Does this imply that the best choice is always Linux or can I run trials of OpenFOAM onboard the Mac and still send the larger jobs to the Linux cluster?

Hi BCD,

I have OpenFOAM on my Mac and then I send my larger jobs to a linux cluster, and this works fine.

It can be more difficult to get OpenFOAM set-up on Mac but if you follow the guides on this forum it should be fine.

Philip

Greetings BCD and welcome to the forum!

Disclaimer: I don't have a Mac, so I don't have first hand experience with one. All I know is what I've read on these forums.


But it's rather simple: if you have a Mac and don't want to use/install Linux, you can build/use a custom build of OpenFOAM on your Mac.
Or you can even create a virtual machine and install any Linux Distribution in it.
It's your choice ;)

As for performance, I have no clue, since I haven't seen any benchmarks.

As for interacting with clusters running Linux: if you have custom solvers/utilities, you'll have to recompile those on the cluster, before using, since the binaries from Mac won't work directly on Linux.

Other than that... it should all work as intended, or so I believe!

Best regards,
Bruno

Thanks guys, You've been doing a ton of work here - the archive posts are invaluable I really appreciate it all.

& of course thanks for getting back to me.

I'll give it a go on the Mac then. I'll probably be back when it comes to talking to the clusters.

Brian