SALOME version 6.4.0 is released

CEA/DEN, EDF R&D and OPEN CASCADE are pleased to announce SALOME version 6.4.0. Please visit news for more details.

This is a public minor release that contains improvements and bug fixes against SALOME version 6.3.1 released in July 2011.

Proceed to the download page to get this release for a go. Note that the Windows version 32bit is also available to download at the same page.

Ten Ways to Fool the Masses When Giving Performance Results on GPUs

It might be interesting to review this article at HPCwire:

Ten Ways to Fool the Masses When Giving Performance Results on GPUs

and another two

Reviewing a paper that uses GPUs

How to write a 'GPUs are awesome' paper

NVIDIA Opens Up CUDA Platform by Releasing Compiler Source Code

NVIDIA today announced that it will provide the source code for the new NVIDIA® CUDA® LLVM-based compiler to academic researchers and software-tool vendors, enabling them to more easily add GPU support for more programming languages and support CUDA applications on alternative processor architectures.

"Opening up the CUDA platform is a significant step," said Sudhakar Yalamanchili, professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and lead of the Ocelot project, which maps software written in CUDA C to different processor architectures. "The future of computing is heterogeneous, and the CUDA programming model provides a powerful way to maximize performance on many different types of processors, including AMD GPUs and Intel x86 CPUs."

The full article is at

NVIDIA Opens Up CUDA Platform by Releasing Compiler Source Code

Otherwise refer to the article at HPCwire:

NVIDIA Opens Up CUDA Compiler

Install OpenFOAM 2.0.x on openSUSE 12.1

The instruction on OpenFOAM installation from albertopassalacqua.com is valuable to read

Install OpenFOAM 2.0.x on openSUSE 12.1

Code_Saturne 2.1.0 has been released

On 31 Oct, 2011, Code_Saturne 2.1.0 (intermediate version) has been released and is available for downloading. The details of the new features are described on the corresponding news page.

The selective major features include:

• Packaging: Code_Saturne is now provided as a single package, grouping all existing libraries (BFT, FVM, MEI, libsyrcs). It also includes preliminary source code for SALOME plugin (CFDSTUDY module and Code_Aster coupling).
• Code coupling: Code_Saturne 2.1 can be coupled with SYRTHES 4.0.0-10 (at least). SYRTHES 4.0 is a complete rewrite of SYRTHES 3.4 with many new features and should shortly be released. Code_Saturne 2.1 also contains preliminary code for Code_Aster coupling (more to come on this topic in next versions).
• User interface: both the script user interface and the graphical user interface have been simplified and completed to enhance user experience. Just give a try to the new runcase script (and its Python overloading) and to the new features of the graphical interface (more to come also on this topic in next versions).
• New mesh readers: Code_Saturne pre- and post- processing has been updated to support CGNS 3.1 and MED 3.0 format. MED 3.0 is compatible with SALOME 6.3.
• Documentation: the user manual has been slightly improve and a Doxygen documentation of the sources is now available. An installation manual is now provided too.
• Configuration: a configuration file can be completed, either globally or by user, to setup some runtime options like the scratch directory, an optional mesh database or SYRTHES 4.0 version to be used.
• Automatic V&V: a tool for automatic run of Code_Saturne has been developped, enabling the user to automatically run simulations, plot graphs and receive a PDF report by e-mail. It can be very useful for automatic Verification & Validation, though it is still in the very early stage of development.

ParaView 3.12.0 RC-3 available for download

ParaView 3.12.0 Release Candidate 3 binaries are available for download on the official page http://paraview.org/paraview/resources/software.html. It is a bug-fix release and the details can be found at http://www.paraview.org/Bug/changelog_page.php?version_id=85.

Release of SALOME version 5.1.6 and ParaView 3.12.0 RC-2

SALOME version 5.1.6 is a public maintenance release for series 5.x of SALOME platform. The version provides several major and minor bug fixes against SALOME version 5.1.5 released in December 2010.

SALOME 5.1.6 can be downloaded from the official page http://www.salome-platform.org/downloads/salome-v5.1.6.

On the other hand ParaView 3.12.0 Release Candidate 2 binaries are already available for download on the official page http://paraview.org/paraview/resources/software.html.

ps, Firefox 7.0 has also been released yesterday and it becomes really faster than the previous versions :)

I am looking for a job

News - I greatly appreciate your comments below and surprisingly plenty of information and valuable advices came to me during the last one year. Thanks to all your concern, I finally accepted a thermal expert position in ABB USA (www.abb.com) and am sitting in North Carolina.

I particularly thank the three companies in England, France and America that I personally consulted for and their encouraging recommendations. I cherish the experiences I have obtained from the part-time working with them.

Within my PhD study, I have published eight research papers. Four of them are in leading journals and their links are as follows:

• Numerical prediction of local hot-spot phenomena in transformer windings. Applied Thermal Engineering. 2012 April; 36: 96-105. DOI: 10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2011.11.054
• Computational fluid dynamics calibration for network modelling of transformer cooling oil flows - part I heat transfer in oil ducts. IET Research Journals - Electrical Power Applications (formerly IEE Proceedings). 2012 January; 6(1): 19-27. DOI: 10.1049/iet-epa.2011.0004
• Computational fluid dynamics calibration for network modelling of transformer cooling flows - Part II: pressure loss at junction nodes. IET Research Journals - Electrical Power Applications (formerly IEE Proceedings). 2012 January; 6(1): 28-34. DOI: 10.1049/iet-epa.2011.0005
• Prediction of the oil flow distribution in oil-immersed transformer windings by network modelling and computational fluid dynamics. IET Research Journals - Electrical Power Applications (formerly IEE Proceedings). 2012 February; 6(2): 82-90. DOI: 10.1049/iet-epa.2011.0122

I am graduating in September 2011 with a PhD degree from School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester. I am looking for a numerical modelling job.

I spent the past more than three years on the CFD simulations which are coupling between electric, thermal and fluid dynamic fields, from which I have accumulated rich experiences on modelling packages such as SALOME, Code_Saturne, Elmer, ParaView and COMSOL etc. I share experiences in this blog, which has also gained worldwide popularity.

I have been programming in C/C++, C#, VB.NET and Matlab since 2002. I also have experiences in Python (the script widely used for automation of modelling and the software such as SALOME and ParaView etc) and Fortran (the user routine definition for Code_Saturne) etc. Meanwhile, probably as a bonus, I am a fan of open-source software, Linux and Mac OS X. I even wrote device drivers for Linux and ported the MySQL client tool running on desktops onto embedded Linux platforms.

I bear high interests in numerical modelling and would like to pursue a career in this field. If you have relevant opportunities, please drop me an email (salad00 at gmail dot com). I really appreciate your help very much.

CUDA HeatTransfer1D program on Mac OS X

I recently ported the CUDA program for 1D heat transfer onto Mac OS X 10.6.8 and CUDA 4.0.31. I only modified the parts related to timing and the program could work perfectly.

The hardware platform comprises GeForce 320M, 950 MHz, and Intel Core 2 Duo P8600, 2.40 GHz. The computation times for GPU and CPU are 1.86 s and 2.15 s respectively; speedup of 1.16. Previously on Windows 7 and CUDA 3.1, GeForce 9800 GTX+ and Q6600 used calculation times 1.43 s and 5.04 s respectively.

The source code is attached for comments.

SGI Acquires Maker of OpenFOAM

SGI, a trusted leader in technical computing, announced that it has completed the acquisition of OpenCFD Ltd., the leader in open source computational fluid dynamics.

SGI Acquires Maker of Open Source CFD Software

SALOME version 6.3.1 is released

The maintenance version SALOME 6.3.1 has been released, which contains planned bug fixes against the version 6.3.0 released in June 2011. SALOME 6.3.1 does not include any improvements or new features comparing to the version 6.3.0.

Please download from the official page to have a go.

HPCwire interview with NVIDIA's David Kirk

Dr David Kirk is Nvidia's Chief Scientist. Here is an interesting interview with David Kirk on CUDA and parallel computing etc,

GPU Challenges: A Q&A with NVIDIA's David Kirk

New software updates including OpenFOAM

Recently there have been some interesting software updates including

1. OpenFOAM version 2.0.0

OpenCFD released OpenFOAM version 2.0.0 and many significant developments have been made. In parallel to the release of OpenFOAM 2.0.0, the git repository was updated to 2.0.x.

2. GeekoCFD 2

GeekoCFD 2 has been released.

3. VMware Fusion 3.1.3

VMware Fusion 3.1.3 (416484) has been release at the end of May. Bugs were fixed and more importantly, Ubuntu 11.04 has been officially supported. The previous version needed patches for its VMware tool because of its incompatibility to Linux Kernel 2.6.37/38.

4. Firefox 5

Mozilla greatly shortened its new version release periods. As a convention Microsoft IE team sent Mozilla a cupcake for launching Firefox 5.


Firefox has been updated automatically to this latest version on my Mac and all extensions work very well. On Windows there is only one exception, IE Tab Plus.

SALOME version 6.3.0 is released

In the good news, CEA/DEN, EDF R&D and OPEN CASCADE are pleased to announce SALOME version 6.3.0. It is a public release that contains the results of planned major and minor improvements and bug fixes against SALOME version 5.1.5 released in December 2010.

SALOME version 6.3.0 provides the results of the porting of SALOME to the newer versions of 3rd party pre-requisite products.

In addition, SALOME 6.3.0 includes several new modules:

• PARAVIS (new post-processing module based on Kitware’s ParaView application)
• HEXABLOCK (hexahedral meshing by creating of a model of the blocks)
• HOMARD (the adaptation of the mesh generated by the Homard solver for the SALOME platform)
• New sample modules and tutorials
  

This new release of SALOME introduces new features and improvements:

• New Geometry operations
• Create edge by length
• Create vertex by length
• Improved "Sub-shapes selection" dialog box
• Analytical curve definition
• Glue edges
• Projection
• Unpublish objects
  
• New Mesh operations
• Copy mesh
• Convert to/from quadratic on sub-meshes
• New Mesh controls
• Over-constrained faces / volumes
• Bare border faces / volumes
• Element diameter 2D / 3D
• New Mesh hypotheses and algorithms
  
• Viscous layers
  
• Advanced size maps in BLSurf
• Enforced meshes with Ghs3D
• Use existing 1D / 2D elements
• Controls Distribution operations in Mesh module: plot in 2D viewer, show histogram in 3D viewer, dump to the file
  
• Improved behavior of clipping planes in Mesh module
• Mesh measurements: Minimum distance, Bounding box
• Preview on most of Geometry and Mesh operations
• Visibility icons in the Object browser
• New view operations
• Rotate view 90° clockwise / counterclockwise
• Zoom at point
  
• Dump study to the single Python script file
  
• And more ... see SALOME 6.3.0 Release Notes for details

The latest installation packages can be retrieved from the official download page, and pre-compiled binaries are also available.

For Ubuntu users it is recommended to download the latest package for Debian 6.0 Squeeze; although there is only a 64 bit version, why not take the chance to upgrade to 64 bit? For other Ubuntu distributions, in detail David suggested downloading packages for

• Ubuntu 9.04: Debian 4.0 Etch or 5.0 Lenny
• Ubuntu 9.10: Debian 4.0 Etch or 5.0 Lenny
  
• Ubuntu 10.04: Debian 5.0 Lenny or 6.0 Squeeze
  
• Ubuntu 10.10: Debian 5.0 Lenny or 6.0 Squeeze
  
• Ubuntu 11.04: Debian 6.0 Squeeze

Next SALOME version 6.3.0 due in May 2011

According to David's message on the SALOME forum, the next major release of SALOME will be SALOME v6.3.0 and the planned release date is May 2011. [1]

Part of the improvements and features this new version will bring to us can be referred from [2], listed as

• Automatic meshing of boundary layers
• SMESH: Histogram of the quality controls
• Option Single/Multi file dump
• "RemoveFromStudy" Function
• Hide/Show Icon (as in paraview)
• GEOM: Performance enhanced when manipulating large models
• SMESH: Mesh common borders
• SMESH: detection of over-constrained elements
• SMESH: create a new mesh from a selected group or from selected elements
• SMESH: Create a clipping plane on several groups

Additionally the MED library version will be 3.0. This is a major change since the API is not compatible with the previous version. This version will read MED files of both format 2.2 and 3.0 and will write format 3.0.

In version 6.3.0 it will be possible to define viscous layer (inflation layers in ANSYS) [3]. It will be defined as an additional hypothesis for the 3D algorithms Netgen, GHS3D and Hexahedron, and the parameters will include:

• Total thickness
• Number of layers
• Stretch factor

The example of viscous layers defined on tetra and hexa meshes, David posted on the SALOME forum, is


Certainly there will also be lots of bug fixes. We are absolutely enthusiastic with the new version and looking forward to its release.

Share interesting stories

Life is not only CFD and there is no clear divisions in life either. I like to share interesting things which I have been looking at; would you be interested in them also?

1. This Tech Bubble Is Different

I have been a programmer for years and I still have a clear idea on the internet bubble around 2000. Time flies and shortly after that one, we are in a next bubble which involves Facebook, Twitter and Groupon etc. If you like computer and internet technology, probably this article from Bloomberg would interest you.

This Tech Bubble Is Different

2. Business owner casts reasonable doubt on accuracy of speed cameras

Computation is not only in research. I like the smart guy in this piece of news; how about you?

Business owner casts reasonable doubt on accuracy of speed cameras

You may like a blog presented in this way

Can you have a try to access Free your CFD via the link below

http://code-saturne.blogspot.com/view

Is it fancy?

These dynamic views brought by Google include Flipcard, Mosaic, Sidebar, Snapshot and Timeslide. For more details you can refer to Dynamic Views for Readers.

Share some helpful articles

1. Installation of Code_Saturne on Mandriva

A very helpful wiki page on how to compile and install Code_Saturne onto Mandriva has been contributed as follows

http://wiki.mandriva.com/fr/index.php?title=Code_Saturne

Since it is a French instruction, I also paste the Google translated English version here, as

The Google translated English version

2. A practical Code_Saturne study example

It is interesting to read a CFD example which combines the usage of SALOME, Code_Saturne and ParaView.

http://www.caelinux.org/wiki/index.php/Contrib:Claws/Real_world_study_CodeSaturne

3. Installing OpenFOAM 1.7.x on openSUSE 11.4

For those who want to install OpenFOAM onto openSUSE, probably this article is interesting.

Installing OpenFOAM 1.7.x on openSUSE 11.4

4. Compiling OpenFOAM 1.7.x on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

For those who want to use OpenFOAM on Mac OS X, the article could be helpful.

Compiling OpenFOAM 1.7.x for OS X 10.6

I hope these articles help you.

ParaView 3.10.0 is released

The ParaView team has announced the availability of the ParaView 3.10.0 final binaries for download on the ParaView download page.

http://paraview.org/paraview/resources/software.html

I repost the Release Notes from the email list as follows:

ParaView 3.10

This release features notable developments, including mechanisms to incorporate advanced rendering techniques, improved support for readers and several usability enhancements and bug fixes.

For the 3.10 release, we have added 60 new readers. The new readers include: ANSYS, CGNS, Chombo, Dyna3D, Enzo, Mili, Miranda, Nastran, Pixie, Samrai, Silo, and Tecplot Binary. A full listing of supported readers can be found in the ParaView Users Guide. We also added the ability for developers to create ParaView reader plugins from previously developed VisIt reader plugins. You can find a full guide on how to do this on the VisIt Database Bridge: http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/VisIt_Database_Bridge.

With this release we have rewritten the ParaView User's Guide and are making it freely available for the first time. The complete guide can be obtained in the help system or online at:
http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/Users_Guide/Table_Of_Contents.

We have included a Python-based calculator which makes it possible to write operations using Python. The Python calculator uses NumPy, which lets you use advanced functions such as gradients, curls, and divergence easily in expressions. Also the NumPy module is packaged in the ParaView binary and is importable from the ParaView Python shell.

There should also be a marked performance improvement for users dealing with large multi-block datasets. We have cleaned up the rendering pipeline to better handle composite datasets, avoiding the appending of all blocks into a single dataset as was done previously.

To better utilize multiple cores on modern multi-core machines, by default ParaView can now run using a parallel server, even for the built-in mode. This enables the use of all the cores for parallel data processing, without requiring the user to start a parallel server. ParaView binaries will also be distributed using an MPI implementation, making this feature available to users by simply downloading the binaries. Since this is an experimental feature, it is off by default, but users can turn it on by checking the Auto-MPI checkbox in the application settings dialog.

Additionally, the 3.10 release includes several usability enhancements. 3D View now supports smart context menus, accessed by right-clicking on any object in the 3D View to change its color, representation, color map and visibility. Left-clicking on an object in the 3D View makes it active in the pipeline browser. Within the spreadsheet view, sorting is now supported and an advanced parallel sorting algorithm ensures that none of the benefits of the spreadsheet view, such as streaming and selection, are sacrificed. Python tracing and macro controls are no longer hidden on the Python shell dialog and instead are now easily found on the Tools menu.

For developers interested in adding support for advanced multi-pass rendering algorithms to ParaView, this release includes a major refactoring of ParaView's rendering pipeline. View and representations have been redesigned and users should see improved performance in client-server mode from reduced interprocess communication during rendering.

LANL's MantaView interactive ray tracing plugin has been restructured to make it easier to use. Version 2.0 of the plugin is now multi-view capable and no longer requires ParaView to be run in a client/server configuration. Similarly both of LANL's streaming aware ParaView derived applications have been merged into ParaView proper in the form of a new View plugin. The underlying streaming algorithms have been rewritten to be more usable and extensible. Both plugins are available in standard binary package for the first time in this release.

For an exhaustive list of the new features and bug-fixes, please refer to the change log at: http://www.paraview.org/Bug/changelog_page.php.

As always, we rely on your feedback to make ParaView better. Please use http://paraview.uservoice.com/ or click on the "Tell us what you think" link on paraview.org to leave your feedback and vote for new features.

Stable version Code_Saturne 2.0.1 is released

I am glad to let you know that the production release version Code_Saturne 2.0.1 can be downloaded from

http://research.edf.com/research-and-the-scientific-community/softwares/code-saturne/download-code-saturne-80059.html

I am curious that all the source code were packaged into zip format. When trying to compile the source code, unfortunately, an error could occur as

:/$ ./configure
Error: permission denied
# the solution
:/$ chmod +x configure

The easy solution is modifying the attributes of the configure file.

By this I succeeded to compile bft package; however when compiling fvm, I have got another error shown as

checking for bft version >= "1.0.0"... configure: error: in `/home/wu/saturne_packages/version 2.0.1/fvm-0.15.2':
configure: error: compatible bft version not found

I checked and found that the "make install" script of bft didn't install proper header files into the destination directory (by default, /usr/local/include). I guess this is a bug to fix, though the headers can also be copied manually.

I didn't try the rest of the compilation yet.