Struggle to get the windtunnel modelbuilder running properly

Computational Model Builder (CMB)
21

Hi John,

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner.

Thank you for your instructions on the cmb-superbuild.
I didn’t try proceeding to this installation yet.
I will probably come back to you with more questions on this subject, but I think I will open a new topic for that, since it is not really the subject of this topic.

For now, I have a few more points to address with you concerning the operation of the windtunnel modelbuilder:

  • I still need to run modelbuilder with the --dr option to avoid the segmentation fault. So maybe it is something which the Kitware developers should investigate in the future.

  • I’m not sure using Docker Desktop directly on my Windows11 system rather than installing Docker Container Engine on my Ubuntu distribution was mandatory. But I red somewhere that it is rather recommended to use Docker Desktop when using Ubuntu through WSL, activating the WSL integration option.

  • I think the main issue was that I ran modelbuilder as root. This issue was solved by activating docker for the user account I created on my Ubuntu distribution, with the command:
    sudo usermod -aG docker ${USER}

  • Finally, I would be interested to know if it’s possible to run the windtunnel modelbuilder without going through the GUI. For example, if I want to run a parametric study with a python script, I would like to be able to set all the parameters directly in my python script. Do you think it’s possible to do that? I guess that the smtk library should allow that, right?

Thank you!

22

Hi Julien.

  • Thanks for reminding me that modelbuilder crashes when running out of the box on WSL. One thing that would be very helpful is for you to run modelbuilder with these command line arguments, which will write a logfile and (in most cases) write the strack trace where the system crashed:
.../bin/modelbuilder -l run.log,9 --enable-bt

That should create a file run.log. If you would try that and post the logfile and any terminal messages, I would appreciate it.

  • fyi we updated the readthedocs “installing the software” page to add some notes based on your observations. Thanks again your feedback.

  • Also yes, it is possible to run the examples from python scripts only, though I’ve never tried doing that end-to-end. The best guidance would be to look into the python tests in the wind tunnel plugin .

    • If you haven’t cloned it yet, the repository is at https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmb/plugins/openfoam-windtunnel
    • The test scripts are in the directory smtk/simulation/windtunnel/testing/python.
    • The scripts use some fairly standard testing infrastructure; I don’t think it would be hard for you to adapt them to a runtime script like you describe.
    • Also, theses test scripts don’t actually run OpenFOAM - they just create the OpenFOAM input files. I can show you how to add that; again it’s nothing tricky just not documented.