Reading & Listening

If you read nothing else in this blog post, check out these two links.

• Mentor Graphics’ Keith Hanna waxes poetic with CFD If, a CFD-themed version of Kipling’s “If…”
• The Talking CFD podcast delves into “what makes CAD so tricky to work with in CFD” and “whether we’re about to lose the human from the CFD meshing loop altogether” with ITI’s Mark Gammon. [Say it isn’t so.]

News From Pointwise

• We’re now accepting resumes for our summer 2017 engineering internships on our Technical Support, Product Development, and Applied Research teams. [You can read my tips for a good resume here.]
• Our 1-question poll on which software package has the best pan, zoom, and rotate implementation remains open through next Tuesday. Take 30 seconds and let us know what you think.
• This summer’s “don’t miss” event will be the 1st AIAA Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop to be held the weekend prior to AIAA Aviation in Denver.

News & Events

• Reuters reports that a private equity firm is in “advanced talks” to acquire MSC Software for an amount reported to be in excess of $800 million. [For the time being this report can be classified as rumor and hopefully not alternative fact.]
• MeshTrends (aka the Symposium on Trends in Unstructured Mesh Generation) will be held at the 14th U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics in Montreal on 17-20 July 2017. It appears that presentation abstracts are due 28 February.
• The Parallel CFD Conference 2017 will be held at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow on 15-17 May 2017. Abstracts are due 09 February.

Software

An example of the new logarithmic scaling in FieldView 16.1. CFD solution by AcuSolve. Image from Intelligent Light. See link below.

• Intelligent Light launched FieldView 16.1 for CFD postprocessing with new capabilities for video export, Python scripting, log scaling of color maps, and more.
• EnSuite 2017 was released for CAD data viewing and translating.
• Dr. Dongyue Li introduced me to dyfluid.com, a relatively new Chinese-language website that “distributes OpenFOAM solver documents to explain the interesting CFD theory in plain words.”

Computers & Computing

• For those of you interested in exploring GPU acceleration of your code, Nvidia provides the An Even Easier Introduction to CUDA.
• Recent progress on cloud computing has dispelled myths of security, licensing, cost, and complexity according to UberCloud’s Wolfgang Gentzsch.
• D-Wave, makers of quantum computers, released their quantum software tool as open source.

Applications & Jobs

• How useful is CFD for data centers? You’ve seen here before links to many articles on data center applications. This article from DataCenterDynamics.com attempts to describe CFD’s utility for this application. [The article must have been somewhat controversial due to its post-publication edits that label it as an opinion piece and add a relatively long errata. Take a look and let me know what you think.]
• How useful is CFD for ambulances? More specifically, how it can be used to minimize the risk of infection for those riding in the back.
• TotalSim has job openings for a Software Developer and a CFD Support Coordinator.
• Take 6 minutes to watch Meshing Basics from Autodesk Simulation CFD.

Facets & Grids

Facets show up in the strangest places, like this video ad for the World Wildlife Fund.

Screen capture from a video advertisement for the World Wildlife Fund. See link above.

And you didn’t think I’d let you go without an abstract painting, did you? Currently showing at The Modern in Fort Worth is an exhibiting of the grid paintings of Stanley Whitney. I had my first, brief opportunity to see them earlier this week and I’m looking forward to my second viewing on 01 February.

Stanley Whitney, SunRa, 2016. Image from The Modern. See link above.