OpenFOAM: Setting Up and Performing Fluid Dynamics Simulations on HPC Systems
An online course on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with OpenFOAM will be organized by Austrian Scientific Computing (ASC) and EuroCC Austria on 13 July 2026.
Computational Fluid Dynamics enables the simulation of fluid flow, heat transfer, and transport phenomena in complex systems. This course introduces efficient and scalable CFD workflows using OpenFOAM on multi-node HPC clusters.
Participants will explore how to perform scalable CFD simulations with OpenFOAM on HPC systems, set up meshes, run parallel fluid dynamics simulations, and analyze complex flow behavior. They will understand turbulence models, solver performance, and distributed computing workflows and gain practical experience in running efficient CFD pipelines on modern multi-node clusters.
Participants of this basic-level course will also learn how to set up simulation cases, generate and refine meshes, define boundary conditions, and run steady-state and transient fluid dynamics simulations. The course covers core CFD concepts including incompressible flow, turbulence modeling, and numerical discretization methods.
Building on these foundations, participants will perform parallel simulations in OpenFOAM, exploring domain decomposition, solver configuration, and scaling behavior on distributed CPU systems. Practical exercises demonstrate how mesh size, solver choice, and communication overhead affect runtime and performance.
The course also introduces post-processing and visualization workflows using ParaView, allowing participants to analyze velocity fields, pressure distributions, vortices, and flow stability.
By the end of the course with hands-on labs, participants will be able to build and execute complete CFD workflows — from mesh generation and solver setup to parallel execution and visualization — and efficiently run fluid dynamics simulations on modern HPC systems.