OpenFOAM on Singularity

Describe how to run OpenFOAM using a singularity container on a slurm cluster. The procedure below was tested on Ubuntu.

Build the OpenFOAM singularity container

First we need to create a singularity definition file to build a container with OpenFOAM installation.

For example, we can create the openfoam.def file.

The singularity build command will build the singularity container image (openfoam.sif)

singularity build -f openfoam.sif openfoam.def

Run MotorBike example

Now we can run the OpenFOAM motorBike example using the following job scripts:

• Sequential execution
• Parallel executon

OpenFOAM uses MPI for parallelism. So, the environment must have some MPI implementation installed. The above scripts have been tested with OpenMPI.

Visualization on Paraview

When the calculation is done, the results can be viewed in paraview, using the following command inside the motorBike folder:

singularity run ../openfoam.sif paraFoam