CFD Pre- and Postprocessing Become Powerful New Mac Tools

User Experience, Graphics and Compute Capability Draw NASA to Macintosh for CFD Meshing and Results Interpretation

Contact: Heather McCoy, 817-377-2807, hlmccoy@pointwise.com or Roger Rintala, 408-739-7609, mailto:rrr@ilight.com

Fort Worth, TX and Rutherford, NJ – 03 September 2004 – In a move bringing together the renowned user experience of Macintosh with the industry’s leading grid generator and postprocessor, Pointwise, Inc. and Intelligent Light are pleased to jointly announce the upcoming availability of their respective CFD (computational fluid dynamics) pre- and postprocessing software, Gridgen and FIELDVIEW, for Mac OS X. The ports are strongly motivated by their common customers at NASA who have begun using Macs for CFD meshing, postprocessing, and visualization. Mac OS X and Xserve provide a powerful and productive environment to handle the compute-intensive tasks and support workgroup data needs, while the Power Mac G5 is a desktop machine people enjoy working with. This is a powerful combination Gridgen and FIELDVIEW users alike will appreciate.

“NASA engineers at several centers have been using Gridgen for many years so when they requested that we port to the Mac we took a very serious look at this platform,” said John Chawner, Pointwise’s president. Steve Legensky, Intelligent Light’s Founder and General Manager, continues, “When customers come to us asking for a new capability, we listen and respond. The interest in the Mac platform has led directly to our decision to bring FIELDVIEW to Mac OS X.” Gridgen’s and FIELDVIEW’s ports to the Mac leverage two key technologies: OpenGL 3D graphics and the Unix-based kernel of Mac OS X. The platform’s graphics and computing power combine to make it a unique platform for the creation, visualization, and interrogation of complex, 3D geometries, meshes, and flowfields. Dr. Craig Hunter, a CFD researcher in the Configuration Aerodynamics Branch at NASA Langley Research Center, has this to say about Gridgen and the Mac: “Mac OS X has grown into a strong platform for CFD development and applications in government, academia, and industry, but one area that has been lacking is commercial grid generation tools for complex geometries. I look forward to Gridgen filling that critical need as a preprocessor tool and enabling us to more effectively use our numerous structured grid flow solvers and other CFD tools on Mac OS X.”

“We appreciate the responsiveness of our vendor partners who listen and respond to our changing computing needs,” notes Robert Garcia, Applied Fluid Dynamics Analysis Group Lead, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. “With FIELDVIEW and Gridgen available on the Mac, we have a new, cost-effective option for fluid dynamics pre- and postprocessing. Because we can use our existing floating licenses on a variety of systems, we can readily deploy the Mac among other platforms without changing our software environment.” “The power, stability and ease-of-use of Mac OS X along with the breakthrough compute and interactive performance of the Power Mac G5 make it an ideal platform for simulation and visualization,” says Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. Pre- and postprocessing of data is a crucial part of the CAE process, so we are thrilled to see applications like Gridgen and FIELDVIEW coming to Mac OS X.”

About Pointwise: Pointwise, Inc. is solving the top problem facing engineering analysts today: mesh generation for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Large manufacturing firms and research organizations worldwide use Pointwise's Gridgen software and services to create the “digital geometry” enabling computer simulation of a product's performance in a fluid environment. Further information on Gridgen can be obtained from Pointwise's web site, http://www.pointwise.com.

About Intelligent Light: Intelligent Light, located in Rutherford, New Jersey, was founded in 1984 with a mission to provide the scientific and engineering community with the best possible tools for understanding data and communicating results. The company's management team has more than 100 years of experience in the business of visualization, CFD, and structural analysis post-processing. Their unique development team is composed of CFD experts, computer scientists, and world-renowned visualization authorities focused on listening to clients and delivering products that meet their needs. For more information, visit http://www.ilight.com.

Pointwise and Gridgen are registered trademarks of Pointwise, Inc. Fieldview is a trademark of Intelligent Light. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.