Special “I’ve eaten too much turkey” Edition*
News & Events
- Siemens PLM Software acquired Mentor Graphics for $4.5 billion. This deal brings together STAR-CCM+ and FloEFD.
- DEVELOP3D also wrote about this announcement and their article includes a link to a Siemens PDF showing how Mentor fits within their portfolio of technology.
- Mentor Graphics also announced a new release of FloEFD.
- The 25th Annual Conference of the CFD Society of Canada will be held 18-21 June 2017 in Windsor, Ontario. The due date for extended (4-6 page) abstracts is 09 January 2017.
- The 12th OpenFOAM Workshop will be held 24-27 July 2017 at the University of Exeter in the UK. [Sorry, no URL yet.]
- Here’s a good summary of the 2016 FloEFD Simulation Conference from earlier this month. In this article you’ll read that their 2017 event will be in Berlin on 7-8 November.
Computing: Cloud, HPC, Exascale & More
- The three great lies of cloud computing. #2 You only pay for what you use.
- The democratization of HPC: software licensing and hardware availability.
- Various Consequences weighs in on exascale computing.
- Here’s Visualizing Data’s best of the visualization web for September 2016.
- The folks at Momentum Analysis think that democratization of CFD is all about accessibility.

This absolutely gorgeous image of a DEM simulation is from STAR-CCM+ v11.06. Image from Siemens. See link below.
Software
- Software Cradle launched SC/Tetra Version 13 (PDF).
- Beta CAE released v17.0.2 of its software suite.
- ParaView 5.2.0 was released.
- A new version of finite element CFD code FeatFlow is now available.
- MSC Software released Adams 2017 for multi-body dynamics simulations.
- ESI announced SimulationX v3.8.
- Tetra4D Automate is “a simple server solution to automate the creation
of rich, interactive 3D PDF documents.” [I seem to recall reading that Intelligent Light’s FieldView software can create 3D PDFs. Is anyone else in CFD using 3D PDFs?] - Previews of STAR-CCM+ v11.06: electronics cooling, stirred mixing vessels, and discrete element modeling (see image above).
- What’s new in SolidWorks Flow Simulation 2017.
Applications
- Exa’s PowerFLOW was used to compute drag on a tractor-trailer and compare the results to a wind tunnel.
- Envenio has written a paper on Multigrid Employing Mixed Structured-Unstructured Data on Manycore Hardware and has made it available for download (registration required).

Alert reader Dan shared this image of the faceted styling of Logitech’s MX Master wireless mouse. Click image for link.
Good Reading & Listening
- 40% of women who earn an engineering degree either never enter or leave the field. Why? This HBR report cites evidence that women engineers are treated differently than their male peers, professors, and employers beginning in college and through internships. [I would appreciate reading comments on this from female engineers.]
- The OpenFOAM Foundation launched a fundraising campaign to receive donations totaling €100,000 to fund the software’s development in 2017. The rationale for the foundation’s fundraising effort seem to be explained by a series of blog posts from CFD Direct.
- The first two episodes of the new season of the Talking CFD Podcast are available for your listening pleasure. They’re with Kelly Senecal of Convergent Science and Nicolas Tonello of Renuda.
Geometry in the Wild
The fine folks at Colossal often feed my fetish for finding meshes, facets, and plain old geometry in art, nature, design, and just in real life (IRL) in general. Their article about the light installations of Nicolas Rivals is no exception. The juxtaposition of hard-edged, artificially-lit geometry and serene, dusky natural settings is quite arresting. More of the artist’s works can be found on his website.
Bonus: Behold the miracle of nature’s meshing as this mushroom extrudes a polygonal surface mesh. source