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.