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All the software supplied with CFDDFC is free and open-source, requiring no additional fees for their use. The software costs are a small fraction of the On-Demand charges for EC2 and are listed on the CFDDFC product page on AWS.
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Software ChargesĬFD Direct From the Cloud is charged as an hourly software fee, alongside the hourly fees for EC2. setting up run-time post-processing of their simulations, rather than downloading raw case data, writing data in binary or gzip-compressed format, etc. This can be a significant cost which users can minimize with careful OpenFOAM configuration, e.g. Transfer is charged at $0.09 per GB beyond the first 1 GB of data and up to the first 1 TB of a given month. Amazon Glacier provides storage at an even lower cost of $0.007 per GB-month for data archiving.ĭata transfer charges are listed as part of the On-Demand EC2 pricing. S3 pricing varies by region and frequency of access, but between $0.0125 are $0.03 per GB-month is typical. The cost of EBS is typically $0.10 per GB-month.Īmazon Simple Storage Service (S3) offers better value for longer term data storage. When running CFD with EC2, the storage can be provisioned for the duration of the simulation, with the necessary data transferred out of the instance before it is terminated and the storage is released. It is charged by the amount of storage provisioned in GB per month, pro-rated to the hour, until the storage is released. Data Storage and Transferĭata is stored using Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) attached to an EC2 instance. CFD is perfectly suited to take advantage of Spot instances because it can accommodate a delay on the rare occasion a bid is rejected. Savings are high because AWS must retain a significant amount of unused capacity to ensure availability of On-Demand instances. The Spot price history for the past 24 hours () on that instance, in the same region, fluctuates between $0.20 and $0.40 per hour, with an average price of approximately $0.30 per hour, saving 82% of the On-Demand price. For example, a c4.8xlarge instance that includes 18 physical cores is priced at $1.675 per hour in the US-Ohio ( us-east-2) region. Spot instances can offer substantial savings over On-Demand instances, as shown in the AWS Spot Bid Advisor. The user is charged the Spot market price - not the bid price - while the instance runs. When a user makes a bid for a Spot instance, it is launched when the bid exceeds the current Spot market price, and continues until terminated by the user or when the Spot market price exceeds the bid. Spot instances are spare EC2 instances that users can bid for, whose price fluctuates based on the supply and demand of available EC2 capacity. On-Demand instances are sold at a fixed price where availability is guaranteed (within the limits of the SLA). Charges for a running EC2 instance (a virtual server on AWS) are incurred hourly, with a fraction of an hour billed as a whole hour. There are 4 ways to pay for EC2 instances, with On-Demand and Spot instances being the 2 options offering a ‘pure’ pay-per-use model.
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Activity is generally interrupted by quiet periods when simulations are halted, e.g. CFD simulations cover a range of sizes and complexity. It avoids minimum spend commitments and long-term contracts, replacing large upfront expenses with low, variable payments that only apply to what you use. Instead, OpenFOAM gives you the freedom to purchase services, such as Training, Support and Developments (to extend OpenFOAM’s capability), when you need them.Ĭloud computing extends this idea to hardware. It offers an alternative to proprietary CFD software which incurs large upfront costs in the form of licence fees and support and maintenance contracts. OpenFOAM is free software for computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
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