How to Run FAST.Farm and TurbSim on Linux?

Wind & Water Systems Engineering Software Tools
1

Dear NREL Team,

I hope this finds you well.

I have a query regarding running FAST.Farm and TurbSim on a Linux system. Do executable files compatible with Linux exist for these two software applications? If not, could you please advise on how I can obtain or compile them for Linux?

I should mention that I am not familiar with compiling applications, so I would greatly appreciate a step-by-step guide if compilation is necessary.

Many thanks for your assistance.

Kind regards,

2

Dear @Abdulbaset.Alazhare,

See the following documentation: 2. Installing OpenFAST — OpenFAST v3.5.3 documentation.

Best regards,

3

Dear @Jason.Jonkman,

Thank you for your prompt reply. I managed to successfully compile TurbSim and FAST.Farm. However, it is taking TurbSim about four times the amount to run the same input file on Linux compared to Windows. The TurbSim version I am using (on both Linux and Windows) is “TurbSim_v2.00.07a” which I downloaded from this link: TurbSim | Wind Research | NREL

I tried using TurbSim which comes with OpenFast_v3.5.3, but that is even slower and is taking twice the time of “TurbSim_v2.00.07a”.

I am unsure what might be causing this issue or if there are specific flags I should have used during compilation. For reference, I am running Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS.

Many thanks for you continuoued support.

Kind regards.

4

@Abdulbaset.Alazhare ,

I think Turbsim’s performance can be very dependent on the compiler and libraries that you use. The Intel oneAPI fortran compiler with the MKL BLAS/LAPACK library generally gives good results and that’s what was used to created the Windows version of Turbsim. It’s possible to install the Intel oneAPI Toolkits on Linux. If that’s not an option, check and see which BLAS library CMake picked up. I generally get better performance with OpenBLAS than the system’s default BLAS library. This can be installed by running apt install libopenblas-openmp-dev and specified to CMake with -DBLA_VENDOR=OpenBLAS.

5

Hello @Derek.Slaughter,

Thank you very much for your response.

After successfully compiling TurbSim using Intel oneAPI, I am now preparing to run both FAST.Farm and TurbSim on an HPC system. I would appreciate your guidance on the necessary modules that need to be loaded in the SLURM script for:

  1. TurbSim (compiled with Intel oneAPI toolkits)
  2. FAST.Farm (compiled with gfortran)

Could you kindly provide a comprehensive list of the required modules for both programs?

Thank you for your assistance.

Kind regards.