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Everton August 30, 2006 09:27

Programming knowledges for CFD users
 
Hi guys

I'm a new user of CFD technology and I'd like to ask you some questions:

What are the modern programming languages used by developers in CFD?

Are Fortran, MatLab and C++ often employed for developing CFD applications?

From the softwares above, which softwares would you strongly recommend me to learn?

Best regards to all Everton

Mani August 30, 2006 15:36

Re: Programming knowledges for CFD users
 
Fortran and C++ are both suitable for high-performance CFD. I won't start a discussion about which one might be "better". Fortran users are biased towards Fortran, and C++ users are biased towards C++ (who would have guessed). I have used both and the bottomline is: They are both suitable for CFD.

Matlab is a different animal. It's not as much a programming language as a library of mathematical tools. For very small problems (maybe a few hundred grid nodes) matlab code may be efficient enough, but for high-performance CFD it's certainly not the tool of choice. (It can be quite useful for post-processing, though).

Which language should you learn? You describe yourself as a "user of CFD technology" and that sounds to me more like CFD application than CFD development. As a "user" you won't have to do that much programming.

However, if you want to become a CFD developer, I hope you already have some programming experience with other languages. Your choice for either Fortran 90 or C++ may then depend on your current knowledge. For example, if you already know C, you might feel more comfortable learning C++ (yes, the philosophy of C++ is very different from C, but you'll at least know some basic syntax). On the other hand, I consider Fortran 90 a little more straight forward to learn by someone with zero knowledge of programming. Either way, don't underestimate the time involved in learning programming and CFD. It's not something you do as a weekend project.

Mark Russell August 31, 2006 16:16

Re: Programming knowledges for CFD users
 
Interesting question that has been posted before - search the forum and you might other vies too. Support much of what Mani has said too. But whatever you do try to stand back from your work - look at the sense of the algorithms, the assumptions etc. rather than just the syntax of the language. That way you will get more transportability from your growing knowledge and programming expertise.

Good luck

srinivas reddy September 7, 2006 08:09

Re: Programming knowledges for CFD users
 
hi i need some tips for programming knowledge in cfd


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