Message: 5
To: email@hidden
From: Brian Helenbrook <email@hidden>
Subject: Fluent
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 11:14:04 -0400
Scitech mailing list and Apple,
I am in control of some money ($50K not actually mine ) to buy
computers for a group of faculty here. One of the faculty uses Fluent
for his research, which is not available on OS X. I would really just
like to buy G5's so I emailed Fluent and tried to twist their arm a
bit. The short of it is - no such luck for right now. I've attached
the conversation below. Looks like I will have to buy at least half
PC's.
Hey Brian,
I think part of the problem must be the high cost of licensing FLUENT
--
unless some of their big industry customers want OS X, there's
probably not
a lot of market there. From my viewpoint, industry is just barely
starting
to trickle into using OS X for CFD, so it could be a few years before
there's demand for FLUENT from big customers. Current OS X CFD'ers
tend to
be in small businesses, small departments of big business, gov
agencies, and
academia, and most of these people can't afford FLUENT (it would cost
us a
few hundred $K per year to license FLUENT for all the CFD clusters
here, and
it's just not feasible). You guys are probably in a unique situation
because you can use FLUENT without paying the big bucks.
If you do have alternative CFD options that run on OS X, it might not
hurt
to let the FLUENT guy know that you are deploying that software on
some OS X
systems instead of using FLUENT. I usually say that software needs
should
drive hardware purchases, but G5 / OS X systems are so much cheaper
and more
productive for workstation-type CFD work that I think hardware becomes
the
driving factor. That's what motivated us to get our CFD tools over to
OS X
several years back and the decision has paid off quite well -- for
instance,
our TetrUSS applications base shot up 70% in a year on OS X (after 12
years
on SGI only) and our workstation costs came down by a factor of 4-8 or
more.
Moving to OS X has really reinvigorated the CFD work in my group.
Craig
--
Dr. Craig Hunter
NASA Langley Research Center
AAAC/Configuration Aerodynamics Branch
email@hidden (new!!)
(757) 864-3020
(Dual G4 - OS X)
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