On the CFX website a new version of CFX 4.4 is promised for the end of July that's supposed to enable parallel computing on homogeneous networks of PC's running Windows NT, and a port to Linux.

It's August, any idea when this latest version of CFX 4.4 will really come out?

On a related point, what would be the best platform for transient problems (such as fluidised beds) that don't require very large mesh sizes, assuming that a lot of money is available for the hardware?

CFX tells me they don't support Itanium (they do have a press release on their web site, dated October 2000, where they promise support for Itanium based hardware from SGI). Linux isn't supported yet, neither are Windows NT clusters. That would leave Windows NT and 4 Xeons, or Alphas from Compaq, or a dual processor Pentium 4. Maybe something from SGI, IBM.

Assuming a fairly large budget, what option would be recommendable? And how much improvement would one get compared to a 1.2 GHz Athlon runing CFX4.4 on Windows NT?

Hello Heiko,

Thank you for your recent enquiry posted on the CFX User Forum. I am able to give the following answers to your questions.

The port of CFX-4.4 to Linux has been done and it is available for our customers.

We do not generally recommend what would be the best platform to run our software on. We port the CFX-4 software to a range of Unix platforms, WindowsNT, Windows2000 and Linux.

At present we have not ported CFX-4 to the Itanium platform. However, we would like to consider the Itanium platform for CFX-4.5. It is worth noting that it is still seen to be a very new platform and the compilers are still fairly immature.

The article you have referred to was describing developments with CFX-5. At present there is some preliminary testing of this for Itanium on Linux only, and for the flow solver only.

I hope this helps to answer your questions.

CFX Technical Services.