On 25th March 2015, CFD Direct was launched. The company was founded by Henry Weller (creator, architect and co-founder of OpenFOAM), Chris Greenshields (co-founder of OpenFOAM), and Jenya Collings, following their departure from OpenCFD in 2014. At the end of our first year, March 2016, we summarise our principal activities.
CFD Direct is launched, from the co-founders of #OpenFOAM, providing #OpenFOAM Training, Development and Support: http://t.co/rbLQOT1579
— CFD Direct #OpenFOAM (@CFDdirect) 25 March 2015
OpenFOAM
- During year 1 we made over 900 code commits to the to the public development line of OpenFOAM (
OpenFOAM-dev), making us by far the largest contributor of code to OpenFOAM. - In 2015, we produced one major (3.0.0), one minor (3.0.1) and one patch release (2.4.0) of OpenFOAM.
- With help of other contributors, particularly blueCAPE, we carried out maintenance on OpenFOAM, reducing the number of outstanding issues by approximately 35%, involving over 500 commits to the bug fix line of OpenFOAM 3.0 (
OpenFOAM-3.0.x). - We managed the OpenFOAM Foundation, the organisation that owns OpenFOAM and ensures it is distributed free and open source only.
- We established a free OpenFOAM documentation resource on our website, writing and maintaining several articles.
- Our posts on social media (primarily CFDdirect@Twitter) updated users about developments to OpenFOAM , which encouraged a strong community to support and contribute to OpenFOAM as free software.
- While approximately 600 hours of development work was funded by customers wanting new features in the code base, we contributed almost 1300 hours of time, unpaid, to OpenFOAM and the Foundation.
- For more information, see CFD Direct Year 1: OpenFOAM.
Training
- In April 2015, we launched 2 × 2 day courses, Essential CFD and Applied CFD, which were delivered as scheduled classroom training courses in Berlin, Houston, London, Chicago and Munich.
- In early 2016 we launched our 2 day course, Programming CFD, which we are delivering initially as Live Virtual Training.
- Our 3 OpenFOAM Training courses, aimed at competency in CFD, are now run as scheduled classroom courses, live virtual training and on-site training.
- We believe our comprehensive, modern programme is the best OpenFOAM training, backed from our position as the primary developers of OpenFOAM and the most experienced OpenFOAM training team.
- We only promote free, publicly distributed, open source software, so that our training is a one-time investment in staff skills without recurring licence fees.
- For more information, see CFD Direct Year 1: Training.
Cloud
- In 2015, we launched CFD Direct From the Cloud (CFDDFC), a complete OpenFOAM cloud computing platform that includes the latest version of OpenFOAM and supporting software running on the latest long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
- The platform provides OpenFOAM in its native Linux OS, which users can access directly from a terminal or via a remote desktop. CFDDFC is available for Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a product on AWS Marketplace, pre-configured as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI).
- To use the product, a user simply launches an instance of the AMI on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
- CFDDFC is in constant use, on a range of EC2 Instances ranging from the small instance, eligible for Free Tier, to the Compute Optimized instances including the largest with 36 virtual (18 physical) CPUs, and with multiple instances networked as a cluster for larger workloads.
- For more information, see CFD Direct Year 1: Cloud.
Next: CFD Direct Year 1: OpenFOAM →
CFD Direct Year 1: 2015-2016