Compared with other software, installing OpenFOAM is (still) a nightmare. They use their very own build system, there are tons of environment variables to set, etc. But it seems that users in academia and industry accept OpenFOAM nevertheless. For release 1.7.1, I took the time to create a little receipt (in some parts very specifically tailored to RRZE’s installation of software packages) to more or less automatically build OpenFOAM and some accompanying Third Party packages from scratch using the Intel Compilers (icc/icpc) and Intel MPI instead of Gcc and Open MPI (only Qt and Paraview are still built using gcc). The script is provided as-is without any guarantee that it works elsewhere and of course also without any support. The script assumes that the required source code packages have already been downloaded. Where necessary, the unpacked sources are patched and the compilation commands are executed. Finally, two new tar balls are created which contain the required “output” for a clean binary installation, i.e. intermediate output files (e.g. *.dep) are not included …

Compilation takes ages, but that’s not really surprising. Only extracting the tar balls with the sources amounts to 1.6 GB in almost 45k files/directories. After compilation (although neither Open MPI nor Gcc are built) the size is increased to 6.5 GB or 120k files. If all intermediate compilation files are removed, there are still about 1 GB or 30k files/directories remaining in my “clean installation” (with only the Qt/ParaView libraries/binaries in the ThirdParty tree).

RRZE users find OpenFOAM-1.7.1 as module on Woody and TinyBlue. The binaries used for Woody and TinyBlue are slightly different as both were natively compiled on SuSE SLES 10SP3 and Ubuntu 8.04, respectively. The main difference should only be in the Qt/Paraview part as SLES10 and Ubuntu 8.04 come with different Python versions. ParaView should also be compiled with MPI support.

Note (2012-06-08): to be able to compile src/finiteVolume/fields/fvPatchFields/constraint/wedge/wedgeFvPatchScalarField.C with recent versions of the Intel compiler, one has to patch this file to avoid an no instance of overloaded function “Foam:operator==” matches the argument list error message; cf. http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/openfoam-installation/101961-compiling-2-1-0-rhel6-2-icc.html and https://github.com/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-2.1.x/commit/8cf1d398d16551c4931d20d9fc3e42957d0f93ca. These links are for OF-2.1.x but the fix works for OF-1.7.1 as well.