Form2Flow is a workflow automation pipeline aimed at introductory teaching computational fluid dynamics (CFD) engineering courses. It allows the teaching team to abstract away GUIs or CLIs used to interface with CFD solvers, replacing them with a simple form submission.
It is built using tools in the freely-available Google Workspace.
The process for running simulations is as simple as filling in a Google Form with geometry files, simulation settings, etc., and receiving the results and logs from the completed simulation in a specified Google Drive folder. The simulations are run on the backend using a CFD solver of your choice, on a HPC system of your choice.
Step-by-step instructions for assembling the workflow are provided in setup_instructions.pdf. Some of the details are specific to the implementation used for the ME123 Computational Engineering course taught at Stanford University in the Spring of 2024, but are readily adapted to different solvers, HPC clusters, etc.
The other piece that is useful is the parent directory of the workflow as present on the HPC cluster that runs the simulations, which helps visualize how the different pieces like the mountpoint and drivers fit together. This is provided under the top-level directory of this repository, ./cluster-files. Again, some file paths and other minor details are carried over from the ME123 environment.
The tool was presented at the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting in November 2024, at a talk titled
Form to Flow: a cloud-based workflow automation system for introductory CFD courses.
The talk was not recorded but the slides are found in this repository: aps_form_to_flow.pptx, which might be a useful reference for the motivation behind his project.