Capturing maximum value from CFD investments – FieldView drives faster insight, increased productivity

New turbomachinery capabilities, direct OVERFLOW-2 reader delivered in FieldView 12.3

Rutherford, N.J. (May 18, 2010) – Automated, streamlined workflows; faster paths to deeper data analysis and visualization; innovative batch-only licensing and robust support for high performance computing – FieldView 12.3, the latest release of Intelligent Light’s industry-leading CFD post-processing software, delivers these benefits and more to product development organizations seeking improved designs, increased productivity and the maximum return on their CFD investment.

“As CFD simulations become more realistic, they also become more complex,” says Matthew Godo, FieldView product manager for Intelligent Light. “Advances in high performance computing are enabling more and larger datasets to be created, but finding the right answers that lead to successful and profitable products in these ever-expanding design spaces is very difficult and time-consuming. FieldView continues to evolve to meet these challenges by allowing our users to harness the full power of their available compute resources, automate and optimize their workflows, and quickly comprehend the key elements of their most successful design ideas. In short, FieldView gives our users the competitive edge in managing, visualizing and understanding their data with speed, confidence and efficiency.”

Maximize computing resources and get your answers faster

FieldView 12.3 gets designers and engineers to the right answers faster in several ways, starting with maximizing any level of available compute resources. For users running simulation data in parallel, FieldView Parallel capabilities are now available directly from the data input menu, and a range of new features make parallel server configuration easier, with configuration and timing information sent directly to the FieldView console window. Users running FieldView on Windows® or Linux® systems with four cores can double the speed of their data runs by utilizing the parallel features with their standard license.

With the release of FieldView 12.3, Intelligent Light is introducing an innovative new ‘batch-only’ licensing option that allows users to run several instances of FieldView on their HPC server for concurrent processing without having to purchase multiple full FieldView licenses. At as little as one-tenth the cost of a standard FieldView license and bundled in packs of 5 to 200, these batch-only licenses will speed processing of transient simulations, animation and report production, and batch-driven automation routines.

“The batch-only licensing demonstrates Intelligent Light’s real commitment to improving user workflows and maximizing their FieldView investment,” Dr. Godo says. “Automating tasks such as repeating the same set of calculations, or creating images and animations for hundreds of design variations, creates increased efficiency, better accuracy, and faster results. What FieldView delivers is a fully reliable and completely backward-compatible set of features that let our users easily bridge the gap from interactive to fully automated batch post-processing.”

Bigger data, quicker insight – 15-20 times faster

Functionality in FieldView 12.3 has been improved and expanded, assisting users in driving to a more efficient, effective CFD workflow. FieldView 12.3 increases the number of grids readable per dataset up to 10,000, making it easier than ever to work with complex data. A new ‘boundary data only’ option gives users a faster path to their first pictures; in Intelligent Light’s testing, limiting the data read operation to only the boundary surfaces resulted in read-in times that were 15 to 20 times faster than reading a full dataset into FieldView, already the benchmark for efficient data loading.

Answering customers’ specific needs

CFD-driven organizations rely on Intelligent Light to help solve their unique problems, and customer requests fuel the development and delivery of capabilities that then become available to all FieldView users. FieldView 12.3 delivers the first in a series of new capabilities for the turbomachinery industry, where highly complex and unsteady machinery simulations, precision engineering, and aggressive timelines create significant challenges.

By enabling users to unroll cylindrical iso-surfaces, automatically placing them flat to the screen, FieldView 12.3 provides a simple and very useful way to visualize, explore, and better understand the intricate flow phenomena common to these machines. Independent horizontal and vertical scaling of unrolled surfaces is also possible. Future FieldView product releases will deliver additional features for evaluating turbo and rotating machinery simulations.

“Most jet engine manufacturers worldwide, for example, are longtime FieldView users and valued partners. Intelligent Light is fully committed to helping them achieve continued success,” Dr. Godo says. “We strive to address the specific needs of customers within distinct industry segments, such as turbomachinery, and the unrolled surface feature being delivered with FieldView 12.3 is targeted to address these needs. At the same time, this unrolled surface feature will give FieldView users in other industries such as automotive HVAC, biomedical devices, chemical mixing and process equipment design a fundamentally new tool to examine their data.”

In the aeronautics and aerospace industries, where the CFD solver OVERFLOW-2 is widely used, a comprehensive direct reader for OVERFLOW-2 is fully integrated in FieldView 12.3 and supports FieldView Parallel operation. The direct reader enables real-time queries and reduces file storage requirements, as large solver files don’t need to be exported for most post-processing. The highly capable and optimized Plot3D file format is still supported, allowing users to choose the option that best suits their needs.

Support for Python® is extended to all currently supported Windows platforms in this release. For FieldView users with existing Python-based automation routines, integration and support have been substantially expanded. Customers now have the option to include a Python version with a standard FieldView installation. Python routines can now be launched from a command line when starting FieldView 12.3, or interactively from the Tools menu.

Technology, Teamwork, Trust: About Intelligent Light

For more than 25 years, Intelligent Light has been solving the toughest engineering challenges faced by manufacturing and research organizations around the world. Architected for today’s high performance computing environments, the company’s flagship FieldView™ family of products combines true ease-of-use with the industry’s most sophisticated CFD post-processing and large-data visualization capabilities.

Intelligent Light’s Applied Research Group conducts pure research on the cutting edge of CFD while customizing and delivering real-world solutions to customers in industries such as aerospace, automotive, general manufacturing and turbomachinery. Composed of leading experts in CFD, computer science, visualization and more, with a customer-focused, results-oriented philosophy, Intelligent Light drives CFD simulation for increased productivity, faster answers, deeper insight and maximum return on investment. Visit http://www.ilight.com for more information.

FieldView and FieldView Parallel are trademarks of Intelligent Light. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. FieldView images provided courtesy of Intelligent Light.

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