OpenFOAM Apptainer - Bare Metal Performance Container

Targeted for cluster and workstation usage. Runs on Apptainer and AlmaLinux enabling near bare metal performance on HPCs, circumventing tedious compilation on each machine by employing a container.

Requirements

You need an Apptainer installation.

OS	Command
Spack	spack load apptainer
Ubuntu	sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:apptainer/ppa sudo apt update -y && sudo apt install -y software-properties-common apptainer
Debian	cd /tmp wget https://github.com/apptainer/apptainer/releases/download/v1.1.8/apptainer_1.1.8_amd64.deb sudo apt install -y ./apptainer_1.1.8_amd64.deb
RHEL / Fedora	sudo yum install -y epel-release sudo yum install -y apptainer

Install

It is recommended to create a directory in your home directory where you store the container.

mkdir -p ~/containers && cd ~/containers
apptainer pull library://inflowencer/openfoam/openfoam:2212

Examples

Every example includes a fully automated script for executing the case either locally or with a job manager such as SLURM.

Example	Description
DES of surface-mounted cube	Based on OpenFOAM tutorial case of a surface mounted cube at Re = 40'000
Supersonic free jet	Mach 3 underexpanded jet exiting an elliptical nozzle
LES of high-lift airfoil	High-lift airfoil of a wind turbine at Re = 800'000

Important tips

Some clusters prefer the .simg format instead of .sif due to image mounting on nodes. Therefore it is advisable to convert the container after you have installed it using

apptainer build --sandbox openfoam.simg openfoam.sif

and instead use the openfoam.simg container when running on a cluster.

Additional information

• The openfoam.def file includes the build commands for creating the container
• Use make all to