STAR Global Conference 2013

CD-adapco announced the date and location for their STAR Global Conference 2013. The event will be held 18-20 March 2013 in Orlando, Florida. The first two days will consist of the general conference program and the third day will be devoted to training in best practices. The call for papers is open with abstracts due by 1 December.

• STAR Global Conference website
• STAR Global Conference blog

Pointwise User Group Meeting 2013

The dates of the STAR Global Conference should sound familiar. They overlap those of the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2013 that we announced back in July. The Pointwise UGM will be held 19-20 March 2013 in Fort Worth with the first day devoted to training on the latest meshing technology and the second day is for the general conference program.

The Call for Papers was recently announced with a due date for abstracts of 15 November.

• Pointwise User Group Meeting website
• Pointwise User Group Meeting call for papers

[You could attend both conferences by skipping the training day on each. Otherwise, you’ll have to choose wisely between these two valuable events. Did I mention that we’ll be honoring someone with the Meshy Award again this year?]

News in Brief

Pressure (top) and deformation (bottom) of an automotive underbody FSI simulation done with AcuSolve and RADIOSS. Image from Altair.

• Airloads.net is a “free download site in the hope it will be useful.” You be the judge.
• FlowKit is offering training on Palabos, an open source CFD code, on 12-14 Sep and 31 Oct – 2 Nov 2012.
• The 1st Symposium on OpenFOAM in Wind Energy will be held 20-21 March 2013 in Oldenburg, Germany.
• AeroDynamic Solutions published the July 2012 issue of their newsletter, The Flow. It includes an interview with Bob Ni, company founder and former senior fellow at Pratt & Whitney. Confidence in CFD means “that the CFD consistently discerns design improvements from design mistakes.”
• It has been announced that the 8th OpenFOAM Workshop will be held in June 2013 on Jeju Island in South Korea.
• Applied Math Modeling released Coolsim 4 for CFD simulations of data center cooling.
• Altair has started a new [and interesting] campaign – AcuSolve, not just another CFD solver. See www.altair.com/really.
• LEAP Australia posted 10 key points from their webinar on ANSYS CFD Meshing Tips and Tricks.
• Symscape posted a video of a dam break simulation done with Caedium v4.
• CEI is seeking your best snippets of text expansion to use with EnSight on Mac OS X Mountain Lion.

A Poor Infographic about Supercomputing

As much as I detest infographics in general, sometimes they’re interesting. Alas, A Brief History of Supercomputing is not. As someone who used a Cray X-MP and a Cray Y-MP among other vintage machines, I was hoping this infographic history would be worth sharing with you. It is, but as a cautionary tale. For example…

• “Today’s fastest computers aren’t yet as sophisticated as the human brain, but they are getting closer.” This statement is about as useful as saying “Today’s fastest aircraft aren’t yet as fast at the speed of light, but they are getting closer.”
• From the Master of the Obvious category, graphics of a calculator, smartphone, and tablet are labelled “Supercomputers are far faster than these devices.” [Emphasis theirs, presumably in case anyone doubted the veracity of that statement.]
• The infographic ends with this ridiculous comparison that [I suppose] is designed to help mere humans appreciate the amount of power a supercomputer uses. Japan’s K Computer consumes 12,660 kilowatts. “That’s enough to power 120,000 100 watt bulbs.” [I wonder if they needed a supercomputer to do that math for them.]