In this special Friday the 13th edition of the CFD news, we find a couple of worthy reads: an article on the future of HPC and a white paper on HPC for the energy industry. For you job seekers (and to believe the media there are a lot of you out there) we list several CFD job openings including one here in Fort Worth. And this here image [too folksy?] is a mesh for an X-38 generated in Pointwise with hex layers near the boundary that transition to tets in the farfield.

The folks at ENGYS wrote about Volvo’s benchmark study for automobile external aerodynamics. It’s important to note that for the study “the deltas between aerodynamic coefficients were more important than absolute values.” That’s something that a lot of people forget when applying CFD in a design environment.

If I were to list all the things I don’t understand, this blog post would be very long indeed. HPC architectures and technology would be on that list. Regardless, I’m plowing through the (“easy read”) ACM paper On the Inevitability of Integrated HPC Systems and How They Will Change HPC System Operations by Schulz et al. HPCwire positioned this paper as “summer reading” because of its disruptive premise. The easiest of the authors’ four guiding principles is “Energy consumption is no longer merely a cost factor but also a hard feasibility constraint for facilities.”

While I’m exploring my ignorance, Facebook’s director of technology and strategy shared his company’s four pillars of hyperscale computing, two of which are compute and memory, during his keynote at the recent CadenceLIVE Americas. (Those presentations were available in the clear for a while after the event but now they appear to be on-demand with registration required.)

Here’s a white paper from ENERXICO titled “HPC solutions for future demands in Oil & Gas, Wind Energy and Transportation Powertrain Industries.“

I continue to be surprised by happy little coincidences. Yesterday one of our interns gave his end-of-summer presentation and described worked he had done on elliptic PDE and biharmonic methods. And what do I run across for this week’s post? Poisson’s Equation is the Most Powerful Tool not yet in your Toolbox. This I understand because elliptic PDE methods are how I cut my mesh generation teeth in the late 1980s and remain at the core of Pointwise today.

Parasolid v33.1 is now available for all your geometry processing and related tasks.

CADfix 12 SP2 is now available.

Beta CAE published a case study that introduced me to FATXML, an XML data format published by VDA. “With the appropriate implementation of FATXML, simulation engineers can have easy access to meta-data during simulation results post-processing and evaluation. This enables unique capabilities to the decision-making stage, without adding effort or cost to the existing simulation processes.”

For those whom are seeking, here are some CFD-related job opportunities.

• AlfaWall Oceanbird has an opening for a lead aerodynamics engineer.
• Searching for CFD yields this long list of openings at Cadence including an Account Technical Executive for CFD position in Fort Worth and a Software Engineer position for Post-Processing in Brussels and everything in between.

Cadence’s Pointwise and FINE/Marine software have gotten their feet wet with a little CFD for surfboards. See more starting in this LinkedIn article.

I’ve been trying to keep up with what’s going on with FreeCAD and the FreeCAD Academy on YouTube is a pretty good intro.

CFD for designing aerodynamic athletic apparel. [Let us forgive the error in the second paragraph in which the author says that “the rate of change in the momentum of an object is equal to the product of its mass and velocity” by which she validates the premise in her opening sentence. I’ll thank Mr. Larson from high school science class for instilling in me the fact that the time rate of change of momentum is equal to the force acting on the object.]

CFD for fluid control components (aka valves).

CFD for “blown-lift technologies for electric ultra-short takeoff and landing (eSTOL) aircraft in advanced air mobility applications.”

CFD for reverse-engineered pumps.

Aerodynamics of volleyballs.

Can’t resist an article about meshing. In this case it’s about Femap’s Automesh Bodies command.

The 13th International ECOFTAC Symposium on Engineering, Turbulence, Modelling and Measurements will be a hybrid event in Rhodes, Greece on 15-17 Sep 2021.

HxGN LIVE Design & Engineering 2021 is coming up on 12-14 October and will be virtual.

Alma Thomas was intentional about creating beautiful works, something other artists explicitly avoided in their own work (because they felt it weakened their artistic intent). In addition to beauty, she strove to illustrate motion as in the breeze rustling through flowers. And she achieved both by discretizing the visual field into semi-regular patches of color arranged in semi-rigid patterns that activate the blank canvas instead of obscuring it. That breathy openness and looseness is the key to providing that life. Read more at Artnews.

Note: Today’s edition is late and brief, not because of the unlucky day but because I’m actually off from work today and wrote at a leisurely pace. And now it’s back to my comfy chair and a book on the paintings of Sean Scully.