Welcome to the “ides of March” roundup of CFD happenings. If you’re not currently enjoying spring break, check your knives at the door and dive into advice for engineering students from Jousef Murad that I couldn’t resist commenting on. Speaking of students, Cadence CFD wants you to be our summer software engineering interns. For the rest of you we’ve got CFD 2030, a ton of GPUs, a couple of wheels, event news, and a delicious application of the week. You are probably wondering what’s significant about this thermal simulation of a plate with a hole. Gonna have to click through for the deets.

The First Heading

• Realizing the Vision of CFD in 2030 has been published in IEEE’s Computers in Science and Engineering. (IEEE login required.)
• The Flux Supercomputing Workload Manager is an open source scheduler for exascale computing.
• CFD Design is offering a free online course in simulating the NREL Phase VI Wind Turbine. [John Smith seemed to enjoy it.]
• Master aircraft design online too.
• Our friends at Revolution in Simulation (Cadence is a sponsor) are running a survey titled Do Non-CAE Experts Run Simulations During Your Product Development Process? Please take a few moments to share your thoughts on this topic.
• You have until 01 April to submit your entry for Leeds University’s Fluid Dynamics Photography Contest for KS3 students. [If a UK reader could kindly tell me what KS3 means I would be appreciative.]

News from Cadence HQ

• CadenceLIVE is coming to Silicon Valley on 8-9 June. Registration opens soon and today is the due date for your abstract that describes the presentation you’ll give about how Cadence CFD software is helping you innovate.
• Internships in Fort Worth are now open. We’re seeking two software engineering interns, one to focus more on product development and one to focus more on research.
• Also in Fort Worth, we have openings for two application engineers.
• Our Brussels office has 11 job openings including software engineers and one product engineer.
• ICYMI, we announced a partnership with Dassault Systemes for design and simulation of electro-mechanical systems.
• Cadence’s Prof. Charles Hirsch will present a keynote at the 2022 Symposium on Turbulence Modeling (27-29 July, Hampton, VA).

Advice for Students

Jousef Murad wrote about the ten mistakes every engineering student should avoid based on his own experience as a student. Here are a few comments based on my own experience as a student.

1. Exam Night Fights (aka Don’t Pull All-Nighters) – I never stayed up all night studying during my undergrad.
2. Running After Marks (aka Grades Aren’t Everything) – While grades aren’t everything, they are something. A high GPA (i.e. 3.5 or higher) on a student’s resume means either of two things to me: the person is naturally smart or the person works very hard to achieve smartness. And like Jousef writes, “do not aim to be the top performer in the class.” Just do the best you can.
3. Bad Communication Skills (aka Learn How to Write and Speak) – It’s true. Your ideas aren’t worth diddly if you can’t communicate them to someone else.
4. Not Doing Internships (aka Get Practical Experience) – While it’s not strictly necessary for your future success, an internship is a great way for you to learn about working life in your chosen field. Plus, it provides some validation to future employers that someone else had found you worthy.
5. Not Picking a Proper Mentor (aka Thesis Supervisor) – While this may seem to apply only to graduate students, I was fortunate to work with a professor my senior year on an independent study project. The professor and I have remained friends in the decades since.
6. Not Socializing (aka Have Some Fun) – I met my lovely wife of 36 years during my undergrad years. No more needs to be said.
7. Join Random Courses (aka Choose Wisely) – The program of study for an undergrad engineering education is pretty well defined including a few slots for social science electives and the like. These days a good advisor will help you decide whether a minor can be obtained and this gives you the opportunity to focus those electives on something of interest to you. Back in the day I was on my way to a minor in philosophy but by the time I was a senior the thought of taking the Philosophy of Mathematics was more than I could handle (see independent study above). But with some planning you can explore another subject of interest to you.
8. Not Coding (aka Programming As An Essential Skill) – There has been a discussion in industry and academia for years about how programming could be made an essential component of an undergraduate education. So much of modern engineering requires use of software so understanding how write your own software would provide useful insight. Plus there’s the practical aspect of being able to program handy tools throughout your time in school.
9. Not Failing (aka Failing is Growing) – I often think that failure is over-rated in the business world. You see plenty of experts trying to take away the sting of failure by making it seem like “no pain no gain.” I’ve even heard business pundits say that you’re not a good business leader unless you’ve failed at least once. (Uh, no.) However, the low point of my undergraduate days was a machine design class on which I scored a 2 out of 100 for writing my name on the paper. That spurred an intense review and rework of everything in the course up to that test which helped me get over that failure and get an A in the class.
10. Attending Every Lecture (aka There Are Better Things to To With Your Time) – I was the guy who attended every lecture and recitation and took notes. Different strokes for different folks.

GPU, Cloud, Business, Etc.

• Monica Schnitger reports that ESI’s OneESI 2024 strategy is showing early positive results with revenue up 3%.
• SimScale’s CEO David Heiny is interviewed by Revolution in Simulation and hints that physics other than fluids are coming to their platform.
• Williams Advanced Engineering is still looking for a CFD engineer.
• Ansys shared information about their use of GPUs for CFD.
• And here’s something from Siemens’ use of GPUs. [The existence of Quality Digest implies the existence of Ineptness Digest.]
• And Graphics Speak talks about GPUs.
• How to get the best OpenFOAM performance on AWS.
• Why is Direct Numerical Simulation of turbulence so expensive? This 35 minute video tells why.
• In case you’ve wanted to try Pointwise’s mesh adaptation, here’s a video that explains in 5 minutes how to use Tecplot’s CFD Analyzer to create the point cloud data that’s needed.

Was Released

• modeFRONTIER 2022R1
• Simcenter SPH Flow 2022
• Beta CAE v22.1.1
• TransMagic R12

Heading

• How about machine learning for fluid dynamics, specifically how models are created and controlled.
• Or maybe you prefer ML for solid mechanics.
• The Tecplot-FieldView Academic Conference India 2022 will be held on 08 April (appears online). Registration is open.
• Ansys Simulation World, an online event, is coming up on 18 May. Registration is open.
• Converting a disused railway tunnel into a road vehicle test tunnel.

CFD for…

• air quality.
• high-performance car.
• plate heat exchanger on a quantum computer.
• triathalon bike wheels. (see image below)
• not to be outdone, truck wheels.

Sometimes the CFD is the Art

The art of science, the science of art, blah blah. Every profession claims to have a little bit of artistry in it. And sometimes visual appeal is a suitable substitute for fine art. We know it when we see something we like. And I like this. It’s a simulation of Kelvin-Helmholtz instability on a moving Voronoi mesh. Watch the video.

P.S. Apologies for this rather tepid edition. Migraines.