Pointwise
- Pointwise’s Dr. Steve Karman will participate in a webinar hosted by the Centre for Modeling and Simulation (CFMS) on 21 September to discuss high order CFD technologies. Dr. Peter Vincent from Imperial College London will also participate in the webinar. For more details, see the registration page.
- CFMS will also host a 20 November seminar at their Bristol and Bath Science Park location on Pointwise’s meshing technology to be delivered by Dr. Richard Matus. For more details, see the registration page.
- Pointwise will be in Stuttgart, Germany on 16 November for a 1-day workshop on Pointwise Training and Product Roadmap. This free event (pre-registration required) is part of our Let’s Talk Meshing series of events.
Steve MacDonald
- The CFD world lost a leader this month with the passing of CD-adapco’s president, CEO, and co-founder, Steve MacDonald. [I had only briefly met Steve once, so I can’t speak of him directly. Based on the people he surrounded himself with at CD-adapco, many of whom I know well, he was a good judge of character. His legacy is in good hands.]
- Monica Schnitger shares her impressions of the man here.
Events
- The 4th International Workshop on High-Order CFD Methods will be held 3-4 June 2016 in Crete.
- Registration is open for the STAR Global Conference 2016 (7-9 March, Prague).
- Desktop Engineering shares a preview of the COMSOL Conference 2015 (7-9 October, Boston).
- Applied CAx offers Femap and NX Nastran training on 19-23 October and a 1-day Femap Symposium on 23 September in Everett, WA.
Software
- Tecplot RS 2015 Release 1 is now available for visualizing oil and gas reservoir simulations. New features include support for NEXUS models and an equation editor. See what’s new in this video.
- foam-extend 3.2 is now available. foam-extend is a version of OpenFOAM that’s “open to community contributed extensions.”
- Flowmaster 1D CFD v7.9.4 is now available.
- PyFR is a multiple nominee for HPCWire’s annual readers’ choice awards. Vote here. (Registration required.)
- ParaView 4.4 is available for download.
- An updated version of Autodesk’s Project Arro is available.
- The SimScale platform was recently updated.
- RealFlow 2015 was launched for 3D visual effects.
- Shipflow 6 was released and its RANS solver is 10x faster.
- Cobalt Version 7 was released.
Computing
Record-setting gas turbine combustor simulation from ANSYS and Cray. Image from Aerospace Manufacturing and Design. See link below.
- ANSYS scaled Fluent to run on 129,000 cores of a Cray XC30 at 90% efficiency, eclipsing their previous performance by a factor of four. See related coverage of this news at Aviation Week (registration required).
- ENGINEERING.com reports on a new high performance computing center at Univ. of Michigan (with investment from NSF) called ConFlux to be used to solve massive simulations including CFD.
- Nor-Tech announced the available of their “Demo Cluster” HPC system for CFD.
- LBM code Sailfish was ported to a GPU cluster.
Programming
- SIAM’s list of the best 10 algorithms of the 20th century includes the Fortran optimizing compiler (1957).
- On a related note, this list of the 20 greatest computer programming inventions includes Fortran.
- AMD’s 3D rendering library, FireRender, is available for those wanting to generate photorealistic images. The SDK is based on C++ and OpenCL.
- ReScience “is a peer-reviewed journal that targets computational research and encourages the explicit replication of already published research, promoting new and open-source implementations in order to ensure that the original research is reproducible.”
Applications
- The 2015 Ford F-150 features aerodynamically designed “air curtains” over the wheels to reduce drag. [Not being a car guy, I never would’ve considered the aerodynamics of a pickup truck.]
- To appear unbiased to my car-loving friends, here’s something about the aerodynamics of the 2016 Aston Martin Vantage GTE.
- And there’s CFD use in the design of racing bikes.
- And [believe it or not] there’s CFD use in the design of sunglasses to wear while riding your racing bike.
- CFD was used to verify the performance of a ship hull.
- Researchers from Virginia Tech are using the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab to study transport phenomena in multiphase system (i.e. underground carbon sequestration, oil recovery, and contaminant transport).
- Nominations are being accepted for the Information is Beautiful Awards through 30 October.
The behavior of oil ganglia (yellow) can be observed as they are mobilized in an experimentally-imaged sandstone (the solid part of the sandstone is shown in blue). Image and caption from ORNL. See link above.
Business
- ESI reported a 14% increase in license revenue and a 5% decrease in services revenue during Q2. Total revenue for Q2 was slightly over €24 million.
- The global CFD market is expected to grow at 13.6% [Thank God, only 1 decimal place.] during 2014-2019 according to a report from Market Research Reports.
- CD-adpaco joined the Fluid Mixing Process consortium.
- Applied CCM, developers of the OpenFOAM derivative Caelus, are partnering with Celeritas Simulation Technology for sales and support of Suggar++ for overset grid assembly.
- Exa reported a 5% increase in license revenue and flat consulting income in Q2 for a total income for the quarter of $15.5 million.
Meshing and CAD
- The International Meshing Roundtable is coming up in a couple of weeks [Austin, TX – See you there.] and in advance of the meeting they’re conducting a survey on current situation and trends in meshing.
- You might want to follow this discussion on a grid independence study on LinkedIn.
- The folks at CFD Engine make the case for using Rhino as your CAD system for CFD. [In which I learned what the word duff means but still don’t understand its usage in the article.] Because they wanted to run CAD on the Mac, that limited their options somewhat. Also noted are Onshape, Autodesk Fusion360, and Caeses.
- Ralph Grabowski at WorldCAD Access is celebrating 30 years of writing about the CAD business.
- SolidWorks 2016 was launched.
…and the Arts
The exhibition CODE and NOISE features the turbulent flow visualization shown below and others from Cascade Technologies as part of a works by several artists that use software as a means of invoking ideas related to “the environment, memory, art history, data collection and surveillance.”
This CFD visualization is featured in Code and Noise, an exhibit in which artists use software to produce works that reflect on current events. Image from Cascade Technologies. See link above.
All I have is this tweet and its images but it looks like the Museum of Design in Atlanta is 3D printing what will be the tallest object in the Americas. I just looks like a mesh to me.
Bonus: This photo essay about NASA Ames Research Center comes with the subtitle This Used to Be the Future which only proves that two people can look at the same thing and come away with two different perspectives. This was done as part of a program at LACMA and elicited a question of morality.
