For our March “Staff Pick” Project of the Month, we selected OpenFOAM, the Open Source CFD Toolbox.
OpenFOAM is the leading open source programmable software tool for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Chris Greenshields, director of the OpenFOAM Foundation and CFD Direct Ltd. shared some thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.
SourceForge (SF): Tell me about the OpenFOAM project please. What made you start this?
Chris Greenshields (CG): OpenFOAM started out in 1989 (as “FOAM”) as a project to test the recently created C++ programming language for scientific computing. OpenFOAM is software for computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
SF: Has the original vision been achieved?
CG: Yes. But originally OpenFOAM was not open source. The vision later became to make CFD accessible and inclusive, which it has achieved but we can always do better.
SF: Who can benefit the most from your project?
CG: Anyone who wants to do CFD, but particularly those who want to be able to customise their CFD and not be tied in to very high proprietary licence fees.
SF: What’s the best way to get the most out of using OpenFOAM?
CG: Start by downloading the code and running some example cases, including those described in the User Guide.
Learning CFD and OpenFOAM can be accelerated rapidly by signing up for the OpenFOAM Training at CFD Direct: https://cfd.direct/training
SF: What has your project team done to help build and nurture your community?
CG: OpenFOAM has an Issue Tracking System that enables users to report issues which are resolved rapidly in most cases: https://bugs.openfoam.org
We keep users informed about latest developments through daily updates on social media:
– Twitter https://twitter.com/CFDdirect
– LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/cfd-direct-limited
We aggregate the information about developments into a convenient, monthly newsletter to which users can subscribe: https://cfd.direct/news
SF: Have you found that more frequent releases helps build up your community of users?
CG: Yes. We package and release the development version of OpenFOAM every 2 weeks to enable users to test new features conveniently. They report issues and the core team fix and re-release. It is the “release early, release often” model described by Eric Raymond in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
SF: What was the first big thing that happened for your project?
CG: Probably the rapid increase in users around 2008.
SF: What helped make that happen?
CG: Reaching a critical level of functionality, particularly in computational meshing. It was possibly helped by the 2008 financial crisis causing companies to cut back on commercial licence fees and look for open source alternatives.
SF: How has SourceForge and its tools helped your project reach that success?
CG: The SourceForge download repositories provide rapid delivery of software packages that make the software quickly accessible to users.
SF: What is the next big thing for OpenFOAM?
CG: The success of OpenFOAM is due to small incremental improvements that occur often – pretty much daily. When combined over months and years, these small improvements take the code to a new level of robustness, extensibility and usability. That is “the next big thing”, and it is continuous.
SF: Do you have the resources you need to make that happen?
CG: OpenFOAM has people and infrastructure to make this happen. The supporting technology, e.g. dependent software, is readily available. We have an annual campaign for maintenance funding with a target of EUR 250k per year: https://openfoam.org/news/funding-2020 We did not reach the target last year, but we are getting closer every year. Many users are from academia and yet OpenFOAM receives no public funding because of lack of support from funding councils and academic institutions.
SF: If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently for OpenFOAM?
CG: Everyone makes mistakes and you can always look back and think about doing things differently. But that is wasted energy, you are better off getting on making those incremental improvements.
One thing we did right was to maintain single ownership of OpenFOAM within The OpenFOAM Foundation to ensure OpenFOAM’s exclusive open source status under GPL v3 and enable simpler enforcement. https://openfoam.org/contributor-agreement/#notes
SF: Is there anything else we should know?
CG: OpenFOAM commands more traffic on the main CFD forum than leading commerical CFD software: https://www.cfd-online.com/About/ (see Services)
To learn more about OpenFOAM, visit their official website: https://openfoam.org/