OpenFOAM. First things first.

Apart from the QuadCore PC with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460, I have an old Dell DualCore laptop running Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) where I have recently installed OpenFOAM, now that they added support for RPM packages. Codename “Spherical Cow” reminds me of a joke a math teacher told us once:

A mathematician, an engineer and a physicist sat around a table discussing how to measure the volume of a cow.

The mathematician suggested the use of geometry and symmetry relationships of the cow, but his idea was rejected on the grounds of being too time consuming.

The engineer suggested placing the cow in a pool of water and measuring the change in the height of the water, but his idea was rejected on the grounds of impracticality.

“It’s easy,” said the physicist. “We’ll make an assumption that the cow is a small sphere, calculate the volume and then blow it up to the actual size.”

Following the download instructions, I was instructed to add a couple of lines to the .bashrc file,


module load openmpi-x86_64
source /opt/OpenFOAM-2.2.0/etc/bashrc

but that didn’t work for me. Instead, I had to change openmpi’s load path, as it was installed inside another folder. Final code looks like this,


module load mpi/openmpi-x86_64
source /opt/OpenFOAM-2.2.0/etc/bashrc

After specifying the proper load path, OpenFOAM was up and running.


[poverlord@localhost ~]$ icoFoam -help

Usage: icoFoam [OPTIONS]
options:
-case <dir> specify alternate case directory, default is the cwd
-noFunctionObjects
do not execute functionObjects
-parallel run in parallel
-roots <(dir1 .. dirN)>
slave root directories for distributed running
-srcDoc display source code in browser
-doc display application documentation in browser
-help print the usage

Using: OpenFOAM-2.2.0 (see www.OpenFOAM.org)
Build: 2.2.0-5be49240882f