Each week of CFD news has its own personality. This week it’s about HPC and the cloud. And CFD for bicycles. No explanation. The NASA video about their HPC CFD capabilities is impressive as is a COMSOL simulation of a submarine being pinged. Speaking of wet things, Shown here is a simulation of flow over fish scales done at City University London.

News

• Tech Soft 3D has acquired Ceetron.
• The Computational Aerospace Lab at USC has an opening for a post doc in CFD.
• The Modelics Lab at the University of Toronto has openings for graduate students in electrical and biomedical engineering.
• Christmas is coming so that means it’s time to run the backward facing step [?]. It’s this year’s Community Christmas Competition for OpenFOAM.
• Flowfusic, a provider of OpenFOAM in the cloud, makes a case for ML and CFD.
• Kubotek3D introduced version 3 of their CAD interoperability tools.

Events 1

• SPHERIC (the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics rEsearch and engineeRing International Community) has launched a series of free online seminars. The first one is scheduled for 12 November.
• Five Days of Pointwise is a series of videos highlighting new capabilities in Pointwise V18.4 for mesh generation. The series culminates with a live Q&A webinar with our engineering team leaders from Product Development, Engineering Services, and Business Development. (The live Q&A requires advance registration.)

Events 2

• At AIAA Aviation this past summer, a panel session delved into the creation of grand challenge problems for assessing progress toward the CFD Vision 2030. A video recording of the discussion is available at cfd2030.com along with the panelists’ presentations on space, hypersonics, propulsion, aerodynamics, and more.
  • A special session at AIAA SciTech 2021 will go into a lot more detail on how these grand challenge problems can be designed and executed.
• ICYMI, the Exascale Mesh Network (ELEMENT) held a workshop last month to discuss how to accelerate meshing to the exascale range. I’m told that the video recordings of each presentation will soon be posted to the site. Some of the presentation slides have already appeared.

Applications & Cloud

• A case study that references a case study. First, Amazon writes about scalability metrics for running STAR-CCM+ on AWS. This study in turn references the user’s experience in a case study by TLG Aerospace.
• In 2021, NASCAR teams will be limited to 150 CFD runs per month.
• The exaFOAM Consortium has received funding to push the OpenFOAM flow solver toward exascale levels of performance.
• Read about Oracle’s plan for HPC in the cloud.
• CFD for “the fastest race bike on the market.”
• And CFD for a “cycling revolution.”
• And more bikes.
• BAE Systems and the Univ. of Liverpool have used CFD to create realistic “wind over deck” environments for use in flight simulations of landing on an aircraft carrier.
• New [to me] is HPC cloud provider Syncious.

Misc.

• CFD, water flower, and ASMR.
• CFD for gas cooling injectors.
• ICYMI, Van Dyke’s Album of Fluid Motion is now freely available online.
• Five reasons CFD is hard according to Ingrid Cloud. Only one of the five isn’t about turbulence or separation.

Meshes Are Behind Everything

I have shared Andy Walker‘s artwork here before. Based on photographic studies of landscapes and cityscapes, he hand renders them with triangles. The image below is the “background” of a recent work titled Singel, Amsterdam and illustrates the level of detail in his images. The link will take you to his website where this digital painting is shown in its full-color glory and available for purchase.

Full disclosure. I have one of Andy’s artworks hanging on the wall of my office. (If only I weren’t working from home so I could see it.) For this particular piece shown here, Andy ran a contest to see who could guess in advance how many triangles it would take the render the scene in the original photograph and my guess was fortunate enough to win second prize.

Bonus: Is it time to kill calculus?

P.S. If this seems rushed, it was. Sorry about that.