Fort Worth, Texas, 10 November 2004 – Ten years ago today, two CFD engineers founded Pointwise to seek solutions to the top problems facing engineering analysts: meshing and pre-processing for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Today, we are happy to be entering our second decade as the leading, independent supplier of CFD meshing software.
“Pointwise is fortunate to have had the opportunity over the past ten years to work with leading CFD professionals worldwide, both as customers and partners”, says John Chawner, Pointwise’s president and co-founder. “We appreciate their positive response to our Gridgen software and have enjoyed working in partnership with them to incorporate new ideas and determine directions for our meshing research.”
In the beginning, Gridgen only generated structured grids and ran only on a single brand of Unix. Over the past decade, unstructured and hybrid meshing technology has been added, and the software has been ported to all the major brands of Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac. Geometry modeling capability has been added including the ability to work with native CAD data formats and tri-faceted data. Native interfaces have been added to all major CFD solvers and new de facto standards like CGNS. Completely automated mesh generation has been achieved with the introduction of Gridgen’s scripting language for the development of templates and macros. “Our customers have kept us quite busy during the last decade,” says John Steinbrenner, Vice President of Research and Development and co-founder. “It has been very exciting to develop, introduce, and then see all these new technologies in use. We have some very big things planned for the near future. Gridgen will continue to evolve in response to customer requirements and we will leverage contracted R&D opportunities where available to accomplish these goals.”
The Gridgen software, once predominately used only in the aerospace market, has expanded into the marine, turbomachinery, and automotive markets as well as niche markets such as bio-medical and electromagnetics. Sales, once limited to the United States, have expanded worldwide to include Gridgen distributorships in Japan, Korea, Germany, the United Kingdom, and many other territories. “Pointwise’s strategy of delivering robust, proven technologies targeted specifically for CFD use has yielded annual growth rates that average 20%” says Richard Matus, Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “We expect to continue growing at that rate in the near future, allowing us to continue to rapidly improve Gridgen and the level of services we provide.”
About Pointwise: Pointwise is solving the top problem facing engineering analysts today: mesh generation for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Gridgen runs on Unix, Linux, and Windows; generates structured, unstructured, and hybrid grids; and interfaces with CFD solvers such as Fluent, STAR-CD, and CFX as well as many neutral formats like CGNS (www.cgns.org). Large manufacturing firms and research organizations worldwide rely on Gridgen as their complete pre-processing toolkit. Further information on Gridgen can be obtained from Pointwise's web site, http://www.pointwise.com.
