Hey there 👋
It’s Robin from CFD Engine & I’ve got the headlines from the little survey I posted a couple of weeks ago.
Nothing heavy, just a few observations – play along & see if you’re “a typical reader.”
I had hoped more of you would be on Mac (like me) but I’ll not hold it against you 😉
Anyway, on to some more interesting results…
Some context
The whole point of this exercise was to get an idea of the tools you use (& how often you use them) versus the tools I use (& write about).
This should help me to align things & make better, more applicable content 🤞
I’ve been digging through the responses & this is my 3-minute executive summary.
Bear in mind that most readers didn’t respond to the survey & this is based on the answers from just over 10% of you.
Headlines
I listed a load of code, tools, operating systems etc & asked if you used them “all the time”, occasionally or never. From that data I reckon…
You’re probably using…
OpenFOAM · ParaView · Scripting (Python & Shell) · snappyHexMesh · Git · Linux & Windows
You’re probably not using…
AWS · Docker · MeshLab · Meshmixer · Rhino · Grasshopper · cfMesh · Gmsh · Dakota · pyFoam · pyVista or a Mac
You might be using…
Blender · FreeCAD · Salome · VS Code
Your favourite OpenFOAM flavour
Almost all of the OpenFOAM users indicated their preferred release:
- just over half of you use an ESI/OpenCFD release;
- one third of you use a Foundation release;
- 8% use something else (spread across Helyx, TCAE, TotalSim, Icon, foam-extend, SimScale or something custom).
For the Windows users, most had OpenFOAM installed under Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Model Size & Core Count
The biggest model was ~200M cells & the largest core count was 2048 – “interestingly” the biggest model didn’t use the largest core count 🤔
However…
You’re almost certainly solving less than 30M cells (& it’s quite likely that you’re actually solving less than 12M)…
Similarly, you’re probably solving on less than 64 cores (& it may well be less than half of that)…
Bits & Bobs
I left a space to suggest any tools that I’d missed. There wasn’t a clear winner here but…
To my friends using commercial codes (CAD, solvers & meshers) – I see you 👀 I’m not well placed to write about these, but I see you (especially my red-edge chasing ANSA friends).
To my vim friend – if you’re in Neovim, I recommend checking this out.
And to my Plasticity friend, that email is on it’s way 🙌
So what?
So what am I going to do with these “insights”?
I’m going to stick with the same primary content.
I’ll focus on OpenFOAM (mainly the ESI/OpenCFD/.com flavour) along with ParaView, scripting & any interesting cross-platform tools that I think you’ll dig.
I’ll keep in mind the cell & core counts & I won’t be scaling everything to the moon.
I’ll do fewer Rhino, AWS & Docker emails (although I still use, & recommend, all three).
I’ll look into Blender & FreeCAD a bit more, the user interfaces scare me, but we’ll see how we get on.
Any comments? Any surprises? Are you a typical reader? Let me know, I won’t tell anyone 🤫
Until next week, stay safe,
