Pro CFD Tools
Hey there,
It’s Robin from CFD Engine & I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m complaining, but I’ve been looking at the current CFD marketplace & wondering…
Why are so many recent CFD tools aimed at new users?
Where are the shiny new tools for pro users?
It’s partly a rhetorical question – I guess it’s easier to wow new CFD users & the market is arguably bigger.
Whereas, pro users are hard to impress & reluctant to switch.
Inertia is real – unless we’re pushed (hard) by an external force (money / management / circumstance) we’re unlikely to move to anything new, even a new colour map 🌈
We’re also a pretty diverse bunch – I can’t think of many tools or services that would benefit most pro CFD users.
For those reasons, it makes perfect sense that many companies focus on attracting newbies.
But, I can’t help looking across at the tools & services on offer to developers & machine learning folks & thinking that we have similar needs – what are we missing out on?
Storytime
About 10 years ago I was talking to a developer friend about my idea to build a cloud CFD platform. He reckoned that it sounded similar to the automated code testing & deployment tools that developers use & that you could get to market pretty quickly by building on top of them.
I didn’t understand what he was talking about, so I assumed that he didn’t understand my idea. Turns out, he was right, but it took me 7 years to figure that out 😳
My point?
Adjacent domains (like code development & machine learning) have lots of pro tools (& best practices) that we could borrow & apply to our own CFD workflows, if only we knew they existed.
The gaps
Which bits of your CFD process could benefit from some additional tooling?
Here are mine, along with an example of a tool that fills that need in an adjacent domain:
- documentation / best-practice / training / support – Kaggle
- faster/automated report generation – Streamlit
- case & data management – DVC
- pipelines / workflow automation – Nextflow
- command-line deployment – Netlify
The last one is an obsession of mine – my vision of a cloud CFD platform looks a lot more like Netlify or Serverless than it does SimScale.
Although, I can think of 52 million reasons why I might be wrong 🤔
Question
We’re in an amazing spot. We have a pro CFD toolkit (OpenFOAM + ParaView + a Unix shell) that we can all use without spending a penny. It almost feels churlish to ask for more, but (as my Gran used to say) “if you don’t ask, you don’t get”, so…
What pro tools would you like to see on the market?
What aspect of your CFDlife could be improved with new tooling?
What tools from other domains have you adopted?
Let me know, I’m keen to hear your ideas & your successes.
Similarly, if you’ve got a pro tool that I need to know about, drop me a note – I’m always on the lookout for new things to share.
Until next week, stay safe,
