Discussion
Sailfish CFD is an interesting python program. It uses
OpenCL to solve fluid flow problems using the
Lattice-Boltzmann method. Sailfish uses
PyOpenCL or
PyCuda to manage the simulations and
pygame as one of its visualization packages. The following steps can be used to add
Sailfish CFD to
PythonXY and execute the examples using
OpenCL.
Installation Steps:
- Install the OpenCL driver for the computer from the CPU/GPU vendor. NVIDIA drivers can be found here. Intel Drivers can be found here.
- Download the source using Git following the links here. If you do not use Git or don’t want to add it to your machine, a portable version is available here.
- Since the developers do not offer packages (yet?), use git to clone their repository. I clone to a temp directory, then work from there.
- git clone git://gitorious.org/sailfish/sailfish.git c:\temp\sailfish
- The repository can be viewed through a GUI using the gitk command.
- I like to keep the python pieces together, so I copy the contents of the sailfish directory from my temp location to the a sailfish directory created under c:\Python27.
- There appears to be an issue with the location of the Mako files. So following the recommendation on the Sailfish google group in this exchange, copy all of the template files from “C:\Python27\sailfish\sailfish\templates” to “C:\Python27\sailfish\sailfish”.
- Create a file named “sailfish.pth” at “C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages”. Edit the file and add a single line with “C:\Python27\sailfish\”. This tells python to look in that directory for the sailfish modules.
- Test the installation by opening Python and typing “import sailfish” at the prompt. If it imports without errors, your installation is probably good.
- Since PythonXY works with PyOpenCL out of the box and Sailfish works with OpenCL, the examples can now be run by using the “—backend=opencl” option. Open up “C:\Python27\sailfish\examples\lbm_cylinder.py” and try to run using the opencl option.
- If your system does not have a GPU, you might encounter an error like “pyopencl.LogicError: Context failed: invalid value”. This is because Sailfish is configured to only use GPUs. I was able to get my installation to work on a system without a GPU, but with Intel OpenCL installed. This was done by modifying “C:\Python27\sailfish\sailfish\backend_opencl.py” modifying line 31 from “devices = platform.get_devices(device_type=cl.device_type.GPU)” to “devices = platform.get_devices()”.
The image at the top of the posting was generated from “C:\Python27\sailfish\examples\lbm_cylinder.py”.
References:
Test Environment:
- Win 7 Professional
- PythonXY 2.7.2.1
- Sailfish git commit with SHA 1 of 29d7c934be8c02cf714ce2307796a4550428b512 from 2011-11-06 at 14:35:56
- Intel OpenCL
- i7 CPU, no GPU
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