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Well I got the bug and started playing with open foam again. I learned a nice lesson about hard disk space, time, and 3d simulations. You need a lot of space and patience. I ran the pitz daily 3d test case and it used up all 50GB of space I had free on my laptop. It also took 5 minutes to simulate 0.0005 seconds and would have required 100 hours to finish the full half second simulation if I had the disk space to spare.
I have some recommendations for people trying to use it for car simulations. Use linux ( a fast distribution like Gentoo is a good choice ). Have at least 4GB of ram, more is better. Have more than 200GB of free disk space. Compile the package yourself and optimize it for your machine. Compile your kernel yourself and optimize it for your machine.
Some other performance notes. Use a linux kernel that has the transparent hugepage patch applied. A processor with four cores is not that much faster than one with just two cores because they fight over memory bandwidth (Larger level 2 caches help a little). If your going to do a cluster you want a fast network with low latency (gigabit or faster).
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