 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
[Sponsors] | ||||
CFD Online is an online center for Computational Fluid Dynamics. Services include several discussion forums, a jobs database, a free CFD reference in the form of a CFD-Wiki, a news and announcement forum, a books guide, an events calendar, and a comprehensive annotated link section with pointers to CFD resources around the world. CFD Online's goal is to offer high-quality web services to the CFD community. The site is independent and it is not tied to any software vendor.
Today CFD Online is the largest and most popular CFD site on the Internet. During a typical week the web site is visited by 43,000 people (unique IP addresses), downloading more than 300,000 web pages per week. In total there are more than 7,600 web sites around the world with links to CFD Online. CFD Online continues to grow and strengthen its position as the world's leading CFD portal.
During 2011 a total of 15,723,403 web-pages were delivered to 1,265,520 unique visitors For a typical average week this gives 301,532 web pages read by 43,137 unique visitors (IP addresses). 2011 was a very successful year for CFD Online. The number of read web pages and the number of unique visitors (IP addresses) reached new record levels. The number of read web-pages increased by 12% and the number of unique visitors increased by 10% compared to the previous year.
Visitors to CFD Online come from typical CFD sites from all over the world. The pie chart below shows the traffic distribution across different top-level domains in 2011. For further details about where traffic comes from please see the most recent web-server statistics.
Visitor demographics are similar to last year. An interesting trend this year is that traffic from India has fallen from 4.6% to 3.4%. Hence, the strong growth seen previous years has stopped and CFD use in India does not seem to be increasing any more. Traffic from Ansys for the first time in three years surpassed the traffic from CD-adapco. More and more companies are also hiding behind anonymous numerical or network addresses. On the browser side Firefox has maintained its almost 50% market share and Chrome has grown into a very strong 3: rd browser with 15% of all traffic. On the operating system side the most notable change is the strong adaption of Windows 7. Linux usage has also increased and now 20% of all visitors use Linux!
The pie chart below shows the relative number of page-downloads for the different services at CFD Online. In total, the discussion forums are still the most popular section, with 50% of all the page-views. The CFD-Wiki has 19%, the CFD Jobs Database 15%, the Events calendar 4% and the Links section 2% of all page-views.
The strong growth in traffic to the discussion forums and the CFD-Wiki seen in previous years has continued also in 2011. CFD Online remains the most popular meeting place on the net for free and independent discussions about CFD. Users seem to prefer the open forums at CFD Online over closed forums run by code vendors.
The news and announcement service at CFD Online is the largest free online CFD news service. More than 3,500 people are now subscribed to the weekly email news-digest and 5,200 people visit the news forum online every month.
The discussion forums at CFD Online are the largest and most popular meeting place on the net for people interested in CFD. In total there are more than 330,000 messages archived in the forums, dating back 14 years. In 2009 the forums were migrated to a new and modern forum platform that has been very well received. Forum traffic continued to grow quickly also in 2011.
CFD-Wiki, launched publicly in Nov 2005, is intended to eventually become the ultimate free CFD reference and text-book. The content is written collaboratively by more than 7,500 registered authors. CFD-Wiki contains more than 460 articles on various CFD related subjects. Traffic to CFD-Wiki has in 2011 again started to grow quickly. Many engineers and students use it as a valuable reference.
The links section is very well known in the CFD world and continues to attract many return visitors year after year. It has been the largest collection of CFD links available on the net since it was introduced in 1994.
The CFD Jobs Database is the section that attracts most people. The CFD Jobs Database is visited by more than 1,300 job-seekers every day! It is a very good way to recruit CFD experts. The CFD Jobs Database has had more than 200 open positions advertised throughout 2011.
The Books Guide is intended to assist students and professionals in finding good CFD books. The guide currently includes more than 200 books. A book-rating system allows readers to review books.
This service is intended to help students and professionals to find CFD related conferences, courses and workshops. The calendar currently includes 26 upcoming CFD events and since the service was opened in 2002 1,515 events have been advertised in it.
CFD Online is hosted on a dedicated HP ProLiant DL380G4 server running CentOS Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. The server is located in a servmatix datacenter in Salt Lake City, Utah, US.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The server has dual 3.6GHz Xeon CPU's and a redundant RAID5 disk array with 15krpm disks to ensure a quick delivery of pages. In addition, a backup-server is standing online to take over in case of severe hardware failures on our main server.
