30 December 2004 – Pointwise, Inc. released Gridgen Version 15.06 today. This latest release of CFD meshing software features a port to the Mac OS X operating system and a major new capability for mesh extrusion techniques.

The Mac port was strongly motivated by NASA customers who have begun using Macs for CFD meshing, post-processing, and visualization. Mac OS X and Xserve provide a powerful and productive environment to handle the compute-intensive tasks and support workgroup data needs, while the Power Mac G5 is a desktop machine that people enjoy working with.

Dr. Craig Hunter, a CFD researcher in the Configuration Aerodynamics Branch at NASA Langley Research Center, has this to say about Gridgen and the Mac: "I look forward to Gridgen filling that critical need as a preprocessor tool, and enabling us to more effectively use our numerous structured grid flow solvers and other CFD tools on Mac OS X."

"We appreciate the responsiveness of our vendor partners who listen and respond to our changing computing needs," notes Robert Garcia, Applied Fluid Dynamics Analysis group Lead, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "With Gridgen available on the Mac, we have a new, cost-effective option for fluid dynamics preprocessing."

Gridgen V15.06 also features a significant extension of the software’s extrusion techniques for generating prism and hex layers. Complex surface mesh topologies consisting of structured (quad) and unstructured (tri) surface meshes can now be extruded simultaneously into hexes and prisms. Also, existing surface grids can be used as the boundary condition for a new extrusion. Adjacent extrusions can differ in height, but still match point-to-point along their common boundary. Taken together, these two additions greatly expand the scope of geometries for which extruded layers can be generated.

About Pointwise: Pointwise is solving the top problem facing engineering analysts today: mesh generation for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Gridgen runs on Unix, Linux, and Windows; generates structured, unstructured, and hybrid grids; and interfaces with CFD solvers such as Fluent, STAR-CD, and CFX as well as many neutral formats like CGNS (www.cgns.org). Large manufacturing firms and research organizations worldwide rely on Gridgen as their complete pre-processing toolkit. Further information on Gridgen can be obtained from Pointwise's web site, www.pointwise.com.