Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) has been the standard CFD tool for fire and smoke modeling for two decades — and for just as long, its pressure solve has been a CPU-bound bottleneck on large domains. FireX, NIST’s experimental GPU-accelerated development branch of FDS, is the first serious attempt to change Read more
“OpenFOAM” isn’t one piece of software with one release schedule — it’s a name shared by three actively developed, independently governed codebases that diverged from the same origin and have been evolving separately for over a decade. On cloudHPC we now provide foam-extend 5.0 alongside both the OpenFOAM Foundation release Read more
Coastlines are where the most damaging events in coastal engineering happen in hours, not years: a single storm can carve meters of dune out of a beach, breach a barrier island, or push a surge far enough inland to flood a community that hasn’t seen water in a generation. Predicting Read more
Multi-domain physical system modeling — electrical, mechanical, thermal, hydraulic, control — often gets split across separate tools that don’t talk to each other well. OpenModelica, the open-source implementation of the Modelica language developed by the Open Source Modelica Consortium (OSMC), was built to solve exactly that problem: one equation-based language, Read more
One of the greatest strengths of OpenFOAM is its open architecture. Whether you are developing a novel turbulence model, crafting a tailored boundary condition, or building a brand-new solver from scratch, OpenFOAM gives you total freedom to extend C++ classes to fit your research or industrial needs. However, moving custom Read more
The 21th OpenFOAM Workshop in Guimarães, Portugal was a fantastic gathering of open-source CFD minds. For my session, I wanted to step away from the abstract theory and focus on something highly practical: OpenFOAM Automation. Whether you are an absolute beginner or a seasoned simulation engineer, the message from the Read more
In high-fidelity engineering, traditional shape optimization can feel like a brute-force endeavor. If you are optimizing an aerodynamic component—like an automotive spoiler, a wind turbine blade, or a transonic aircraft wing—using the standard finite-difference approach, your computational cost scales linearly with every new design variable. Introduce 100 design parameters, and Read more
For decades, fire safety engineering was a game of rigid, prescriptive rules. Building codes dictated exact travel distances to exits, specific fire-rating hours for drywall, and strict corridor widths. It was a “one-size-fits-all” approach that worked well for standard office blocks but often stifled modern architectural visions—think sprawling airport terminals, Read more
In a traditional HPC environment, launching an OpenFOAM simulation feels like a project in itself. You have to manage version sourcing, write manual decomposition scripts, and handle the tedious task of reconstructing parallel results. At cloudHPC.cloud, we’ve eliminated this overhead. When you run a simulation, our specialized OpenFOAM script takes Read more
In the world of OpenFOAM, modeling how particles interact with fluids is a classic challenge. While the standard DPMFoam (Discrete Particle Method) is great for dilute systems, it often struggles when particles get crowded. That’s where MPPICFoam and its dynamic-mesh sibling, MPPICDyMFoam, step in. These solvers use the Multiphase Particle-In-Cell Read more