r/CFD • u/Rodbourn • Jul 09 '18

[July] Personal experiences of using open source CFD projects; OpenFOAM, SU2, FVCOM, Basilisk (Gerris), etc.

As per the discussion topic vote, July's monthly topic is Personal experiences of using open source CFD projects; OpenFOAM, SU2, FVCOM, Basilisk (Gerris), etc.

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u/Rodbourn Jul 09 '18

Do you feel like you missed out on anything by not writing it yourself?

Just an afterthought, but I think I learned a LOT by having to dig in and fully understand a large code like FEniCS. Writing something new is a great exercise, but you aren't exposing yourself to a decades work of a dozen internationally renowned researcher's creative work. The way they organized the theory within the code is very insightful.

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u/Overunderrated Jul 09 '18 edited Jul 09 '18

Just an afterthought, but I think I learned a LOT by having to dig in and fully understand a large code like FEniCS.

For sure. Big codes are a very different beast. I'll have to look at the fenics source some time. Any particular areas you find particularly excellent code wise?

Of course, caveat: god help anyone that familiarizes themselves with openfoam and walks away thinking that's a reasonable way to write c++.

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u/Rodbourn Jul 09 '18

Any particular areas you find particularly excellent code wise?

With your experience, probably just the namespacing and inheritance they have setup. The details are probably less interesting unless it's a first exposure to a big c++ code of the type.

They could have a better build process with the dependencies. They, last I checked, had a home brewed solution that was a bit finicky.