CFD Direct was was launched in March 2015 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. We previously reported our principal activities during our first year to the end of March 2016. We summarise below our principal activities for our second year ending March 2017; in March, Will Bainbridge, an experienced OpenFOAM developer, joined the team at CFD Direct.
Contribution to OpenFOAM
We undertook almost 1200 man-hours of new developments, of which approximately 50% was funded by customer projects, leaving 600 hours unfunded. We undertook 825 man-hours of maintenance work, of which 415 unfunded hours was spent resolving issues on the tracking system, and 317 unfunded hours was spent on other activities for the OpenFOAM Foundation, such as maintenance of its websites. In total, CFD Direct contributed over 1300 man-hours of (unfunded) work in-kind to OpenFOAM, to the benefit of its users. Our hours of work on OpenFOAM are summarised below.
Development
- Made over 1000 code commits to the to the public development line of OpenFOAM (
OpenFOAM-dev). - Produced the major OpenFOAM v4.0 and minor OpenFOAM v4.1 releases.
- Created new functionality particularly in post-processing, boundary conditions and physical modelling.
- Packaged the development line,
OpenFOAM-dev, maintaining its “always-releasable” quality. - Packaged OpenFOAM for Ubuntu, other Linux distributions, Windows 10 and macOS.
- For more information, see CFD Direct Year 2: Development.
Maintenance
- Upgraded and relocated the Issue Tracking Website to a dedicated website at
https://bugs.openfoam.org. - Resolved approximately 500 issues on the Issue Tracking Site with help of other contributors.
- Ran a successful campaign to raise €100 k for maintenance of OpenFOAM in 2017.
- Redesigned and maintained the OpenFOAM Foundation website (
https://openfoam.org). - Created a dedicated website,
https://cpp.openfoam.org, for the C++ Source Guide. - Moved OpenFOAM downloads to a dedicated signed, authenticated repository at
http://dl.openfoam.org. - Managed the OpenFOAM Foundation, which owns OpenFOAM and ensures it is distributed free and open source only.
- For more information, see CFD Direct Year 2: Maintenance.
Training
- Delivered 55 days of OpenFOAM Training with its 3 × 2 day courses, Essential CFD, Applied CFD and Programming CFD as…
- … Classroom Training in London, Berlin, Munich, Houston, Chicago and Beijing; Virtual Training; and, On-Site Training.
- Launched our Programming CFD course, containing modules in C++ programming applied to popular examples in OpenFOAM.
- Successfully ran live Virtual Training courses with participants from a wide geographical area.
- Updated Training for OpenFOAM v4, including our changes to make OpenFOAM easier to use.
- For more information, see CFD Direct Year 2: Training.
Cloud
- Maintained CFD Direct From the Cloud (CFDDFC): our complete OpenFOAM cloud computing platform.
- Updated CFDDFC to OpenFOAM 4.0 and 4.1, running on Ubuntu 16.04.
- Became an Advanced Technology Partner at Amazon Web Services (AWS) with CFDDFC in the AWS Marketplace.
- Performed a case study of the cost of CFD in the cloud with AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), particularly using Spot instances.
- Made CFDDFC available on AWS X1 instance types which offer up to 64 physical cores on a single instance.
- Released CFDDFC on Microsoft Azure as a Marketplace product, which is Microsoft Azure Certified.
- For more information, see CFD Direct Year 2: Cloud.
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