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