Comments on: CFD in 2014

By: carlos

carlos — Sun, 27 Sep 2015 08:14:45 +0000

Really interesting this post about CFD in 2014 being both an academic and an industrial user of CFD codes. I am curious to see the 2015 version.

By: John Vanworkum

John Vanworkum — Wed, 14 May 2014 19:09:49 +0000

I like your point about slow adoption of CFD (or CAE in general) in the Cloud. From my experience there are several obstacles that have contributed to the slowness. A couple that I’d like to mention here. The lack of cloud licensing models from the major commercial vendors is probably the main one. Only one vendor, that I know of, has a true cloud license. As a Cloud platform provider and integrator, we have to wrestle with all the “non-friendly” licenses models out there and it often just leaves the end-user frustrated. Another obstacle is lack of effective 3-D visualization from the Cloud. Visualization is critical to the work-flow and time can be saved by pre/post processing in the cloud where the data resides. Without good 3D (or even 2-D) capable visualization from the cloud, adoption will continue to be slow. We’ve overcome the 3-D visualization barrier but the licensing barrier is one that we can’t control and it will take a lot of time to change.

By: Conal Duffy

Conal Duffy — Tue, 13 May 2014 10:55:09 +0000

Well said about webinar Shengwei, Most cases it was used for Branding. We can belive only the top software that in market and their webniars…

By: A Tale of Two Years: 2013 and 2014 in Simulation and CFD | Another Fine Mesh

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 16:40:28 +0000

[…] And with a forward leaning slant, CAE Watch gave us their annual look at the coming year in computational fluid dynamics, CFD in 2014. […]

By: shengwei

shengwei — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 13:16:54 +0000

In reply to yiorgos.

Hi yiorgos, thank you for your comments.
For branding, it is more on “educate users”. CFD software vendors need show potential users how to use their software to solver customer’s problem. Bragging about the advantages or features will not build “trust”.

For solution-based meshing adaption, it is a possible solution. But up to now, in commercial CFD codes, such mesh adaption still has very limited capabilities (compared to meshing software). Some of them can only perform simple refinement. Very a few can do mesh smoothing. Most of them ignore the inflation layers (therefore spoils your mesh). Some CFD vendors do not provide this at all. Even worse, a lot of CFD engineers never use this.

By: yiorgos

yiorgos — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 11:48:54 +0000

Really liked your “2013” post and from back then I anticipated the 2014 version.
Excellent points.
But I found quite interesting what you write about branding.
I infer from subsequent text that by branding you basically mean customer care / after sales support.
Do you believe CAE companies don’t provide high-level support currently?
Plus you say, “Building trust with potential users is more and more important for CFD software vendors.”
Do you also think that trust is not as high as it should be or you mean it has to go higher?

Secondly, you say “meshing software and solver still don’t talk with each other directly.”
I thought adaptive meshing (provided now by most of vendors) was the solution to that.

By: shengwei

shengwei — Sun, 05 Jan 2014 14:00:59 +0000

In reply to John Chawner (@jchawner). Hi John, thank you for sharing the precious info on GPU for meshing.

By: shengwei

shengwei — Sun, 05 Jan 2014 13:53:56 +0000

In reply to dennisnagy. Hi Dennis, thank you for the excellent suggestion.

By: shengwei

shengwei — Sun, 05 Jan 2014 13:52:23 +0000

In reply to Shishir. Hi Shishir, thank you for the input. Actually, the rising of middle-tier (traditionally) CFD software may disrupt the status quo.

By: John Chawner (@jchawner)

John Chawner (@jchawner) — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 21:07:13 +0000

Another nice article in the tradition of last year’s predictions for 2013. And thank you for giving us the entire podium – 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place – for the problem of meshing!

Regarding GPU, we did an in-house study a couple of years ago. Although we were able to achieve fairly impressive speed-ups on certain operations (37x) the complexity of the coding changes would’ve made ongoing maintenance difficult (e.g. cross platform maintenance, accounting for lack of a GPU). Plus, GPU programming isn’t simple especially from the memory management standpoint. Things have probably changed since then so we should probably re-investigate.

Thanks for writing this.

By: dennisnagy

dennisnagy — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 22:40:51 +0000

Nice year-end article with a good list of “food for thought and action” topics around the CFD focus. I think it’s a good framework for a roundtable discussion. Maybe Ken Wong of Desktop Engineering or Jeff Waters, Group Organizer of “New Trends in CAE Simulation” would like to organize an on-line audio roundtable with some of us as participants.

By: Shishir

Shishir — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 21:43:20 +0000

Nice points. Another thing which we might see continue in 2014 is further consolidation of CFD space. Perhaps Ansys will try to acquire StarCD and create more monopoly. The way open source and cloud platform are growing, it might not be a bad idea for StarCD to sell.