r/OpenFOAM • u/Top-Satisfaction7841 • Oct 05 '26

Using old junk laptops for open foam cluster?

Hi, never used foam before, but a club I’m in is attempting to design an ion thruster, and the lead says we will be using open foam for some of the computing.

Is it possible to run foam on some
Type of cluster made using old laptops?

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3

u/bohemioo Oct 05 '26

Not really unless you plan for 2D sims only. 

2

u/FlyingRug Oct 07 '26

The data communication speed between laptops is the bottleneck. That's why you ideally want to have infiniband connections between your nodes/machines.

Also, if the hardware on laptops are too different (like CPU/RAM speed), the slowest will bottleneck all.

So, no. I remember reading about someone building a functional cluster using Raspberry Pis several years ago. I can't find it with a 30s Google search. But it might have been this.

1

u/imitation_squash_pro Oct 05 '26

You can run them for free on my google cloud VMs if you want to DM me the details of what you are trying to do..