Software & Applications

• Here’s news about another cloud-based engineering startup. Airstone promises a real-time, supercomputer-based, simulation environment.
• FloEFD contributed to the design of a championship winning skeleton sled.
• Symscape’s presentation at the GPU Technology Conference illustrates that MPI acceleration of OpenFOAM is still faster than GPU acceleration.
• Code_Saturne 3.0 was released with a long list of updated features.

Science

Turbulence behind a cylinder in cross flow. Image from Leap Australia.

• Why Reynolds Number is important in CFD, from the Leap Australia CFD blog.
• After reading this, I believe overcurvature is why my Slinky never lasted more than a day.
• This 30 minute video provides an introduction to the Lattice Boltzmann technique as implemented in the open-source CFD code Palabos.
• Rayleigh’s noncoalescing jets of liquid are explained by velocity and air entrainment.

Reading & Other News

• Spring 2013 issue of MSC Software’s Simulating Reality
• Volume VII, Issue 1 of ANSYS Advantage
• Agenda of this June’s NAFEMS World Congress
• Exa‘s financial results for the most recent fiscal year showed a 6% growth to $48.9 million. The company is optimistic about the coming year because the results of their R&D investments should be coming to fruition soon, including a cloud-based product currently in beta testing.
• By my count there are now three major annual events related to OpenFOAM:
  • The 1st ESI-OpenCFD OpenFOAM User Conference, 24-26 Apr 2013, Frankfurt, Germany
  • The 8th International OpenFOAM Workshop, 11-14 Jun, Jeju, Korea
  • The Open Source CFD International Conference (date and location of 2013 event unknown)

Science?

Screen capture of video Mosh Pit Simulation Reveals Crowd Dynamics by Jesse Silverberg et al.

Cornell grad students and professors have shown that the behavior of metal heads in a mosh pit is very similar to the motion of gas molecules including not just the randomness but behaviors such as a circular vortex and lane formation.

So the next time you go see Lemmy and Motorhead you can write it off as research.