Jobs

• Engineering.com’s article on Winning Strategies to Land that Great Engineering Job is a worthwhile read, especially the part about follow-up. [50% of our job applicants, especially for internships, never reply to the very first email we send them after receipt of their resume (which we then don’t bother to review).]
• The University of Cambridge seeks a research assistant in CFD for compressors.

Software

• The FLOW-3D blog is publishing a series of articles on new features coming soon in v11.2 including this post on enhancements to the particle model.
• DEVELOP3D write about MSC Software‘s new releases of Nastran 2017, Patran 2017, and Marc 2016.
• Our friends at Applied CCM would like your feedback on their Caelus CFD solver (an OpenFOAM derivative/fork/spin-off).
• As reported in Aviation Week, CFD is supposedly going to begin having more impact on aircraft maintenance, refurbishment, and overhaul [that’s what MRO stands for, right?]. But the article is behind a paywall so we only get the teaser.
• You can read more about FloEFD’s integration into Solid Edge in this article from Engineering.com.

A FloEFD solution performed in Solid Edge. Image from Engineering.com. See link above.

Exascale Computing

• The Exascale Computing Project from the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $34 million dollars worth of contracts (35 in total) for exascale software development. The one that caught my eye is ExaHDF5: Delivering Efficient Parallel I/O on Exascale Computing Systems.
• The ExaFLOW project in the E.U. announced €3.3 million of funding for 8 agencies specifically to move CFD to exascale capability.
• OpenHPC is a community effort to aggregate tools and libraries for HPC on Linux systems.
• Our friends at Engineering.com specifically directed me to their article on The Democratization of HPC which means cloud computing and new (i.e. “affordable”) license models. [Yes, I have openly mocked the term “democratization” but it’s worth pointing out that I’m a member of the ASSESS Initiative’s working group on Democratization. Karma? Perhaps. I hope to have more to write about that later. (Democratization, not karma.)]

Events

• The AVL International Simulation Conference will be held in Graz, Austria on 27-29 June 2017. Abstracts are due 28 Feb 2017 and registration is now open.
• The Talking CFD Podcast is coming back for season 2 – here’s a trailer on Soundcloud for what’s coming.

News

• The article A New File Format for CAD Users was not what I expected. It’s about Pantone’s Total Appearance Capture tool for an object’s color.
• Mentor Graphics announced Dr. Aihua Wang from Magneti Marelli as first place winner of the inaugural Frontloading CFD Award for work on Integrating Thermal Analysis into Automotive Lighting Product Design. [A picture of Dr. Wang’s winning work sure would’ve been nice.]
• As reported by Monica Schnitger, our friends at ANSYS earned $246 million in Q3, an increase of 3%.
• Altair and TotalSim announced a partnership.

Art of the Grid – Classic Edition

I’ve been remiss in not sharing any of Victor Vasarely’s work that fits into the meshing motif. Throughout the 20th century, he produced many paintings that are strongly geometrical and include a grid-type structure that might be appealing to those engineers for whom more abstract works aren’t of interest. (As seen in the Sotheby’s catalog for their contemporary art day auction on 18 November.)

Victor Vasarely, RE-NAB-II-B, 1968. Image from Sotheby’s. See link above.

Bonus: Enjoy particles.js, an online meshy thing on Code Pen.