OpenFoam on Google Compute Engine

I signed up for the free preview of Google Compute Engine. The project I described in their questionaire was basically just some hobby-level CFD stuff, so I am surprised they sent me an invite. This post provides links to the initial setup documentation and getting started tutorials, and describes getting OpenFoam up and running on an instance.

• GCE Hello World
  
• gcutil Tool Install
  
• Overview
• Instances
• Networking, Firewall
• Disks
• Images

Once gcutil is installed this initializes the project:

gcutil getproject --project_id=varconcfd --cache_flag_values
which should give output looking something like this: An instance is added like this:

$ gcutil addinstance my-first-instance --wait_until_running Status check like this:

$ gcutil getinstance my-first-instance should give output something like this:

The default instance runs a recent version of Ubuntu (they also have CentOS 6 images available as well) so you can use the standard distribution package management tools to update and install programs.

The instance can be deleted with:

gcutil deleteinstance my-first-instance

Log in to a running instance with:

gcutil ssh my-first-instance

I followed the instructions for installing OpenFoam on Ubuntu from the OpenFoam site.

Once the user configuration is complete a simple test confirms things are installed and configured correctly.


The configuration can be saved to a custom image for later use using the image_bundle.py tool that is installed on the default images.
sudo python /usr/share/imagebundle/image_bundle.py \
-r / -o /tmp/ --log_file=/tmp/abc.log

The image must be stored on Google Cloud Storage (this requires billing to be set up):

gsutil cp /tmp/4860e52466c0646558e252326e43db11cadac7c3.image.tar.gz gs://varconcfd

Then log out of the instance and add the image to the project.

gcutil addimage openfoamimage gs://varconcfd/4860e52466c0646558e252326e43db11cadac7c3.image.tar.gz --project_id=varconcfd

Once this is done then new instances can be initialized with the custom image.

gcutil addinstance --image=openfoamimage mynewinstance --project_id=varconcfd

Ready to run!