Are workstations still a thing?
Morning,
It’s Robin from CFD Engine & I just wanted to take a moment to say thanks for sharing a small slice of your Saturday morning with me, it’s very much appreciated 🙏
Last week’s email was a long one (well done if you made it all the way to the end 👏) this one is a little lighter. We’ve got (another) new version of OpenFOAM, I want to ask you a quick question and reminisce a little bit…
OpenFOAM v8
The OpenFOAM Foundation released OpenFOAM 8 a couple of weeks ago & all the observations I made after OpenFOAM 2006 was released still stand (check out that email, if you missed it). The v8 highlights, from my perspective, are:
faceZoneAverage – an easier way of reporting a field average over a face zone (if you’ve never tried it, this was/is surprisingly tricky);
Corrected face centre calculation – a change that halved the residuals on the motorbike case, nice.
There’s loads of other stuff too, but nothing that makes me want to switch from v2006 (not that I’ve actually managed to catch-up & switch to v2006, yet). Check out the release notes for more info.
By the way, is it just me that finds the Foundation release note format really hard to parse? Probably 🤓
So, here’s the question…
Are workstations still a thing?
I don’t have a local workstation. I have an ageing MacBook Pro that just about manages to run little CFD jobs, usually just to check syntax etc, and everything else gets run remotely.
But it’s time for a new machine & that got me to wondering – “are workstations still a thing?”
I mean, I know they still exist, but do you have one? And does your CFD process need one?
It was an idle thought, but it sent me off on a trip down memory lane. Back to my PhD days where workstations were very much a thing, and I never got one.
Those were the days of painstakingly, hand-crafting my 1MILLION cell meshes, nudging individual nodes to get the skewness down.
Straining the Sun Ultra 10s in the computing lab or using a remote desktop into my supervisor’s SGI Octane 2 (when he wasn’t in).
In those (distant) days, we had way more machines than we had Fluent licenses, but still only 3 machines on the whole campus that could initialise my case in serial.
On to my first job in CFD & my first workstation, Drogo (or was it Musso 🤔 they were all named after dead F1 drivers). I can’t remember the spec. either, but I do remember that it wasn’t an Opteron (they were too new & I was too junior to get one of those). It wasn’t one of the giant Sun machines that the team leaders “wore” like a badge of honour either – your workstation very much reflected your seniority. Shouts of “who’s got a chip free” regularly rang out as people hunted for somewhere to get a case meshed, especially on a Friday afternoon.
But that’s long gone for me & I just wondered if workstations are still a thing? Does your process need a big machine? Do they still take the strain when it comes to meshing? Or do they help to take some of the load off the cluster? Do team leaders still get the best machines? Are Friday afternoons still manic? Genuinely interested to know.
As for my upgrade, I was all set for a 16" MacBook Pro, but then Apple dropped a new iMac this week & I’m all confused again. Maybe I can grab a Dual Opteron from eBay, that should do the trick 😉
Until next week, keep calm & mesh on,
