[herger]

Hi all.
In my office they have bought a new pc: 2 Xeon quad-core, 48 Gbyte RAM.
We will use it for fluid dynamics and numerical simulations.

Which 64 bit Linux-OS would be more suited? We will use commerical softwares like ANSYS FLUENT and AVL FIRE, C and FORTRAN compilers.

Thanks and the best regards

Herger

[henrik]

Dear Herger,

my feeling is that most applications in the precompiled OpenFOAM will work on all them, but I haven't tried.

This is, of course, only half of the story:
a) You may have trouble compiling "your" applications. This is essential for any serious work, but should be easy to fix;
b) The precompiled paraview/paraFoam will most definately not work with the installed Qt and require additional packages & recompilation. There many thread concerning this, so I will not elaborate. This is relatively hard to fix, but you might to not use paraview/paraFoam ...

Since OpenFOAM comes with full source, it will run on almost any toaster and it's more a question of how much pain you want to suffer. However, you don't have this luxury with the closed-source codes you mentioned. So I would find the common denominator between the closed-source codes and make OpenFOAM (or at least the parts that you need) work on that.

Henrik

[olesen]

Originally Posted by herger

Which 64 bit Linux-OS would be more suited? We will use commerical softwares like ANSYS FLUENT and AVL FIRE, C and FORTRAN compilers.

As Henrik mentioned, OpenFOAM is open source and can be compiled on many different systems. I do know that OpenCFD develops on openSUSE, but reportedly has Ubuntu installed somewhere for testing.
Check what Fluent and Fire support - my guess is that they only support a RedHat based system (Fedora or Scientific Linux) or openSUSE. Pick whichever one that you or your sysadmin are most comfortable with.

[gwierink]

Dear Herger,

Fluent is supported on Red Hat (Enterprise) and SUSE. At the moment there is also support for Solaris, but that will be dropped. The latest release of Ansys, the Work bench R12, is at the moment only supported on Windows. I guess linux support will follow. It is possible to install Fluent on Fedora or OpenSUSE, but it needs some work. As Henrik and Mark point out, commercial codes usually do not come as source codes to compile yourself. Fortan and C compilers are available for free on any linux distro, as far as I know. For a nice and free C++ compiler on Windows you can try dev-C++.

Hope this is of any help.

Regards,

Gijsbert

[alberto]

FLUENT 6.3 works out of the box on openSUSE 11.1 (you need to install some motif library, but they're provided in the OSS repository). The only operation you have to do is to set paths, as explained in FLUENT installation guide.

Intel Fortran and C++ compilers work without any issue too. Same for MatLab, if you need it.

OpenFOAM compiles with the system gcc without any modification (OpenCFD release, I did not try -dev, but I assume it is the same), but you need to manually recompile paraview and its reader after installing qt4-devel and editing the appropriate file so that it does not complain about the different version of Qt (search the forum, it was discussed already).

I have recently installed ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop because it has a newer kernel, which fixed a bug I had with my wireless card driver. However, maybe because I am too used to openSUSE, I am not yet fully comfortable with it. In addition, on 64 bit machines, openSUSE offers a better integration (browser plugins for acrobat and flash working out of the box, if you need them), and support bi-architecture packages out of the box.

Best,
A.