Software

• SU2 v4.2 has been released with a new fluid-structure interaction capability.
• Here’s an article describing CD-adapco’s capabilities for simulating noise in fluids and structures.
• Engineering.com provides a first look [and it really is a first look for me] at CFD software suite, Capvidia FlowVision.

Fluid-structure interaction in SU2 v4.2. See link above.

News

• Gartner’s Marc Halpern gave a keynote address at the recent NAFEMS conference in Seattle and shared five of his views of what’s coming in CAE.
  • Freemium and democratization. Regarding the latter, he believes that perpetual licensing is on its way out.
  • Componentization (aka encapsulation or appification). Keeping the simulation details under the hood will make use of CAE by non-experts much more likely.
  • Model Based System Engineering. The integrated behavior of a system is rarely modeled these days.
  • Knowledge Creation. Retaining and reusing simulations can be the key to better design understanding.
  • I’ll let you click through to read the fifth.
• Desktop Engineering interviewed new Tecplot president Tom Chan on the company’s acquisition by Vela Software.

Applications

• CFD will be used to optimize the hull of liquefied petroleum gas ships.
• CFD for cooling datacenters.

Hardware

• In this article on exascale computing [note: not exaflops], it is said that the overwhelming performance improvement over today’s hardware will come from parallelism as opposed to the chips.
• Cloud computing provider Rescale received $14 million in funding.
• Are engineering workstations going away?

You Don’t Have to Like It

As someone recently said to me, “You’ll never get me to like modern art.” That’s OK because it’s really not my intent. That would be like someone trying to make me like Indian food, country music, or hockey. All I’m doing is sharing examples of when science and art converge, at least from my point of view.

And point of view or perspective has a lot to do with the work of James Turrell. In his series Corner Shallow Spaces he creates the illusion of three dimensional objects with light. In his work Raethro II Green shown below, I see a tetrahedron. And to a certain extent, we do the same thing with mesh generation software; we create with light on a flat computer screen the illusion of a three dimensional object.

James Turrell, Raethro II Green, 1969. Click image for source.

P.S. Google Chrome decided to “reorganize” my bookmarks again so if any of these links has already been shared, please pardon the duplication. I also had neither the time nor patience to wade through the mess it created to ensure that I got all the fresh links for today’s post. Again, sorry. I see the irony since I’m the guy who recently praised Chrome as the best browser.