CFD Online Discussion Forums - Installing Open Foam and needed packages on shared disk for cluster environment

Hi there,

I've been trying to install OpenFOAM on a linux x86_64 cluster environment. So all of our users could use the software without any need to install the same package on their home directories and spend their disk qouta for the OpenFOAM.

The compiler, mpi library and other needed softwares (like metis, paraview) are third party and don't want to install them as OpenFOAM forces me to install under some directories.

I use intel compilers and intel mpi libraries for buiding OpenFOAM. There are no problem about them. The problem is about building the metis and other third party things.

In fact, the main problem is the philosophy behind building the OpenFoam. This not the opensource way in viewpoint of system administration. We have big cluster and lots of users. So the softwares should be installed the places where the system administrators wants them to be loaded. Opensource philosophy should makes this possible.

Programming is not a very sraight forward process, I know that. And OpenFOAM is a great software and I am very happy that our users use OpenFOAM instead of fluent etc. And I also know that some softwares requires some other softwares (and in some cases exact versions of those softwares). In some cases it's not very easy to maintain lots of open source software packages. Especially they must be installed, maintained and used by one person that is not a system administrator or a computer expert.

But It would be so good, if there is a way to build OpenFOAM without any forcing configurations. Maybe there are configuration options to build OF the way I like, but there is no documentation abot those config options, if there are any...

Are there anyone that can build the OpenFOAM without the documanted way?

Thanks in advance.

Ender GULER
System Administrator
National Center for HPC of Turkey
Istanbul Technical University
Istanbul/TURKEY