Building OpenFOAM in a Cray Linux Environment
 

Hi,
I have an internship at the Blue Waters supercomputer. The environment on the machine is a Cray Linux Environment. My project includes being able to use OpenFOAM a computational fluid dynamics visualization tool. This program is not openly available on the machine and i am not sure if it has ever been built in this environment before. Also, I have never built anything in any Linux environment but am very willing to learn. If someone could help me. Tell me if it is even possible for a Linux user who just knows how to navigate and copy files and connect remotely, is basically all i know how to do. Any resources to learn how to accomplish this or perhaps a step by step procedure , anything really that would be helpful i will appreciate.

Thank you

As I recall, Cray uses the Suse distribution, with mods for processors. The programming environment should be the same as the standard Suse.

The first problem you will have is making sure that the required libraries are available. For that you will have to look through the OpenFOAM documentation for the list. Then find out whether these can be made available, or if you have to build them first as well.

One problem you might have is that OpenFOAM will not have been modified for the attached processors that may be on the Cray (not sure which one you have, nor is it required to be on it at all). These added processing elements are really fast... (they used to be Xilinx based).

Other than that, it SHOULD be no more than installing the source, a ./configure (with some library references), followed by a make command.

If this is to be installed for general use, you will need an admin to do a "make install", but it is possible to even build with defaults specified so that only a tar file used by the admin can install in the /usr/local directory on the various nodes.

OpenFOAM has been ported to the Cray XT-4 and 5 systems. Depending on who you work for (organization wise, if you work for the site then this might be possible), you might be able to get a version already built.