Research Software Engineering Special Interest Group

Commitment

The RSE Special Interests Group aims to bring together developers of OpenFOAM and OpenFOAM-related projects. The main goal of the committee is to investigate software engineering practices that can facilitate the development of OpenFOAM and its integration with downstream and related projects, as well the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reproducible) management of community-contributed research software and data.

Links: Online meetings (New meeting link as of 2026) /// meeting notes /// Matrix chat /// CFD online thread /// New: Announcements mailing list

News and events

This year, we are starting with a focus on interoperating with programming languages beyond C++. In this endeavor, we invite developers of projects from the wider community to present their insights.

Talks in 2026 (all CET/CEST timezone - Germany):

• Tuesday, January 27, 16:00-17:30
  • The potential of Python bindings for OpenFOAM, Henning Scheufler, NeoN project (slides)
• Thursday, February 26, 16:00-17:30
  • Coupling OpenFOAM with Julia, Sergey Lesnik, Wikki GmbH (slides)
• Thursday, March 19, 16:00-17:00
  • pythonpal4foam: Enabling Python-based calculations in OpenFOAM, Simón Rodríguez, University College Dublin (slides)
• Thursday, May 7, 16:00-17:00
  • VPMFoam: A 2D incompressible Hybrid Eulerian (OpenFOAM) - Lagrangian (Python) Solver for External Aerodynamics. Rention (Kyriakos) Pasolari, Delft University of Technology (paper, dissertation, slides)
• (more coming up)

Online meetings: On Jitsi meet

Join the chatroom: On Gitter/Matrix

Receive announcements via email: Subscribe to the mailing list

Scope and goals

The group discusses RSE-related topics proposed by its members and documents findings in a publicly-accessible repository, open to contributions from the community. These act as recommendations to the Steering Committee and OpenFOAM-related projects. Implementing or enforcing these practices into OpenFOAM is out of scope.

More specifically, the group has the following goals:

• Investigate and demonstrate workflows for developing, testing, and distributing code.
• Propose workflows to scale up OpenFOAM development and testing, including contributions by the community.
• Disseminate good development practices in the community.
• Disseminate reproducible research practices (including distributing and citing software and data).
• Identify potential for aligning the OpenFOAM development with related software and propose approaches to integrate with such software.

Why this name?

"Research Software Engineering is the use of software engineering practices in research applications." - Read the full article on Wikipedia.

We treat OpenFOAM as software used for research (and partially developed in a research context), and we consider OpenFOAM code, case files, and results, as research-related artifacts.

Workflow

The committee meets in regular intervals (once per month) and organizes dissemination events every two months. These include online talks on specific topics by invited speakers, panel discussions on broader topics, and group-based exploration of new topics. Once per year, the committee also organizes presentation and groupwork sessions in the OpenFOAM Workshop.

By the nature of its goals, the committee meets with developers of other projects with similar goals and challenges, to exchange knowledge and potential solutions to common problems.

The committee documents its findings on a public repository and in publications to the OpenFOAM Journal.

The group communicates on Gitter/Matrix.

Members

The group is currently led by Gerasimos Chourdakis (Univ. Stuttgart) and Moritz Schwarzmeier (TU Darmstadt) (chair and co-chair, rotating yearly).

In contrast to other groups, we do public seminars/discussions. While there are regulars that stay around for longer periods of time, there is no fixed members list.

All meetings are open to non-members and the dissemination events are publicly announced. Developers of any OpenFOAM variant, OpenFOAM-related, or unrelated projects with similar goals are particularly welcome.

Activity log

2025

• 2025-11-07: Organizational meeting, focusing on the future of the group.
• 2025-10-14: Regular meeting: Brief introduction to modular solvers in OpenFOAM from OpenFOAM foundation and to the OpenPDAC module for multiphase flows (talk by Mattia de' Michieli Vitturi, Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Sezione di Pisa) - slides archive
• 2025-07-11: Regular meeting: Debugging OpenFOAM code (talk by Patrick Höhn, University of Göttingen/GWDG/NHR-Nord@Göttingen) - slides from the OpenFOAM Workshop 2025
• 2025-04-25: Regular meeting: Challenges and workarounds in OpenFOAM-preCICE: A function object that needs to support multiple OpenFOAM versions and checkpoint everything (talk by Daniels Vidulejs, TUM and Gerasimos Chourdakis, Univ. Stuttgart) - notes archive
• 2025-02-28: Regular meeting: The OpenFOAM Benchmark Runner (talk by Gregor Olenik, TUM)
• 2025-01-17: Regular meeting: The Setup OpenFOAM GitHub Action and GitHub Actions in practice (talk by Gabriel Gerlero, CIMEC) - slides archive

2024

• 2024-11-29: Regular meeting: Packaging OpenFOAM for the Nix package manager: process and issues (talk by M. Hausch and S. Hauser, University of Stuttgart) - slides archive
• 2024-10-18: Regular meeting: Apptainer containers for OpenFOAM (talk by M. Elwardi Fadeli, TU Darmstadt) - slides
• 2024-07-12: Regular meeting: Building OpenFOAM with the Meson build system (talk by Volker Weissmann) - see related issue - slides, slides archive
• 2024-04-11: Regular meeting: Automatic code formatting (part 2) + talk: "Adopting modern software development practices within the NeoFOAM project"
• 2024-02-16: Regular meeting: Automatic code formatting (part 1) - related notes

2023

• 2023-12-07: Regular meeting: Continuous Integration / Talk: The SFB1194 approach to CI with OpenFOAM - related notes (reproducibility), ci
• 2023-09-29: Regular meeting: Reproducible code and cases, with examples from the OpenFOAM Journal - related notes
• 2023-07-28: Regular meeting: Contributing workflows in OpenFOAM-related projects - related notes
• 2023-07-14: Splash talk announcing the group at the 18th OpenFOAM Workshop in Genoa, Italy
• 2023-07-13: Met at the 18th OpenFOAM Workshop in Genoa, Italy
• 2023-06-27: Wiki page gets some first content
• 2023-05-16: Wiki page created
• 2023-05-09: Approval of the group by the OpenFOAM Governance

2022

• 2022-12-15: Official application to the OpenFOAM Governance
• 2022-11-25: Organizational meeting, clarifying goals and application procedure
• 2022-11-23: First meeting with the OpenFOAM Governance - slides
• 2022-10-25: Organizational meeting, clarifying goals and application procedure
• 2022-07-20: First brainstorming meeting, collecting topics and goals
• 2022-07-11: Software Engineering session at the OFW17, including three talks
• 2022-05-09: Proposal for a software-focused BoF track at the 17th OpenFOAM Workshop (Cambridge, July 2022)

The idea dropped after an improvised RSE talks session at the 17th OpenFOAM Workshop (Cambridge, July 2022). We convened a few times since, and proposed the SIG in November 2022. This page started in May 2023, and first content was added in June 2023.

Statistics

OpenFOAM SIG RSE Statistics

Date	Meeting attendees (max)	Mailing list members	Matrix members
2026-01-27	16	13	14
2026-02-26	11	17	15
2026-03-19	11	20	15
2026-05-07	8	23	17