OpenFAST

OpenFAST is a wind turbine simulation software designed to facilitate the development and analysis of wind energy systems. It offers engineers and researchers a powerful toolset for modeling and simulating the dynamics of wind turbines, enabling them to assess performance, reliability, and design optimizations. One notable platform utilizing OpenFAST is FAST.farm, a collaborative initiative aimed at advancing wind farm modeling capabilities. By harnessing OpenFAST's robust simulation capabilities, FAST.farm empowers stakeholders in the wind energy industry to conduct comprehensive analyses of wind farm layouts, turbine interactions, and energy production forecasts. Together, OpenFAST and FAST.farm represent pioneering advancements in wind energy simulation, driving innovation and sustainability in renewable energy technologies.

OpenFAST operates primarily in serial mode, mostly using a single core for computations. However, it does support limited parallelization using OpenMP for certain submodels. Specifically, OpenMP parallelization is available for the OLAF free-vortex wake submodel of AeroDyn and for the FAST.Farm wind farm extension within OpenFAST. Therefore, the execution speed of OpenFAST simulations are mostly dictated by the speed of the CPU rather than the number of cores available, being the effect of the latter only visible when simulating multiple simultaneous turbines with FAST.Farm.

The following benchmarks are currently available for OpenFAST:

• 5MW_Land_BD_DLL_WTurb
• 5MW_OC4Jckt_DLL_WTurb_WavesIrr_MGrowth
• FAST.Farm - ModAmb_3

All simulation files can be found on the official OpenFAST regression test repo.