Chapter 900 Competitors' Predictions

Similar scenes naturally occurred not only at Ohio State University.

As Professor Harold guessed, many people followed Chang Haonan's account on arXiv a year ago.

After the latter posted a dynamic, the follower's mailbox would immediately receive a reminder email-

Originally, such a function might have to wait for a few more days until the Internet era was fully arrived.

But because of Chang Haonan's sudden appearance, the technicians of Cornell University's Science and Technology Campus were "forced" to develop this function in advance...

That's why thousands of people clicked in to see it within ten minutes.

You know, arXiv is not a self-media. Although there is no threshold for registration, its content inherently excludes most non-academic people.

And even scholars, in 2001, not everyone can master the use of the Internet.

Besides, everyone is very busy, and it is impossible for them to be like an idle person and soak in the Internet all day long.

Therefore, being able to get a four-digit reading volume in a short period of time is already a very amazing communication efficiency.

However, not everyone has the same mentality as Harold.

Later.

San Francisco, Stanford University.

Professor Anthony Jameson was frowning slightly, looking at the PDF document displayed on the computer screen.

It was naturally the preprint paper published by Chang Haonan.

But unlike Harold, there were several other people dressed similarly sitting next to him.

They were from the Swedish COMSOL company and were the heads of the development business of COMSOL Multiphysics numerical calculation software.

In fact, COMSOL had long recognized the potential of multi-physics simulation tools. One of its founders, Svante Littmarck, began to write similar modules based on the MATLAB software that had just been commercialized in the mid-to-late 1980s.

Unfortunately, it was still in the early stages of the development of computer application science. Only top universities or super companies such as Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and IBM could apply computers on a large scale at work.

Everyone has idol baggage and wants to develop their own application software independently.

You said to purchase software from outside?

I can't afford to lose that person!

So the commercialization of COMSOL products has never been smooth.

In this regard, it is the Chinese universities and research institutions that have limited capabilities and know that they do not have the ability to develop software independently, so they provide Torch Group with a huge amount of commercial space.

In the true sense, "fast progress is due to a low starting point" is true.

It was not until TORCH MUltiphysics was released and began to seize the market with absolute performance advantages that 1LAB's MATLAB commercial toolkit was launched, and 1SOL Multiphysics a year later.

It was also in order to quickly catch up with the forerunners that COMSOL hired Anthony Jameson as its chief technology officer at a high salary-

Before the name Chang Haonan appeared, Anthony Jameson could be said to be one of the greatest names in the field of CFD, especially in the field of finite volume method.

Since the 1970s, he has developed a series of CFD-related core algorithms for companies and institutions such as Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, NASA, French Aerospace, and Dornier.

In particular, he once wrote a code framework for predicting ideal transonic flow on swept wings-FLO, and based on this, he developed the most successful CFD software "A488" for Boeing before the 1990s.

The latter is the core computing tool in the development process of Boeing 757, 767 and 777.

It can be said that during that period, Jameson's role in Boeing was almost similar to Chang Haonan's role in China today...

And such a big man really had an immediate effect after joining COMSOL.

In 1999, the newly renamed COMSOL software was almost overwhelmed by competitors and could only survive at a super low price in some colleges and universities that could not afford TORCH Multiphysics.

Less than two years later, the newly released COMSOL Multiphysics 2.0 has achieved more than 90% of the efficiency of its competitors in the electromagnetics-structural mechanics-fluid mechanics modules.

Although according to industry consensus, TORCH Multiphysics must have a more powerful "professional upgrade version", it has not been publicly released after all, and does not constitute commercial competition.

Therefore, in recent months, COMSOL has grabbed a lot of market share with its high cost-effectiveness and its status as a pure European company.

Especially some small and medium-sized start-ups, and research institutions that are willing to try various new things.

Although it is a bit embarrassing for a European company to have fallen to the point where it can only win by cost-effectiveness.

But it makes money.

It's not shabby.

However, before they could breathe a sigh of relief, they found that the developers of TORCH Multiphysics on the other side seemed to have come up with something new...

This sense of oppression is simply numbing.

Therefore, the group rushed to Stanford without even having lunch and asked Professor Jameson for a response strategy.

"Professor, what do you think?"

Klaus Helz, COMSOL's resident manager in the United States, looked at Jameson who had not spoken for a long time and tentatively broke the silence.

“Very nice model.”

Jameson came up with a compliment.

This almost caused Hertz to have a cardiopulmonary arrest.

However, the former changed the subject immediately:

"But only on a theoretical level."

It can only be said that Jameson knows how to suppress desires before promoting them.

Heltz, who had gone through a lot of ups and downs in less than a second, had no time to complain about this and quickly asked:

"So, professor, what you are saying is...there are still many difficulties in implementing this algorithm?"

"That's right."

Jameson let go of the mouse and turned to look at Hertz, who was sitting not far behind him:

"Using LSM, oh, this level set method to simulate evaporation, atomization and combustion on the deformation interface is indeed closer to reality than the empirical vapor layer model and simple heat transfer model."

"But in terms of specific algorithm implementation...traditional meshing, I mean, even moving meshes such as the Lagrangian mesh method, are difficult to meet the mesh generation accuracy in this paper. and speed requirements.”

"You must know that most two-phase flow interfaces themselves change rapidly with time. The original LSM method is not strictly conserved and cannot guarantee accuracy in long-term simulations of more than 1 second."

"Although Professor Chang's new algorithm achieves conservation when dealing with two-phase flow problems with divergent free velocity fields, the generation efficiency in the Cartesian coordinate system will be reduced..."

Having said this, the former took off his glasses and rubbed the corners of his sore eyes:

"Of course, this paper is still a preprint, and it does not involve much about the specific implementation process of the algorithm. But unless the computing speed of the computer is improved by 3-4 orders of magnitude compared to now, there will definitely be no way to solve the problem of long wheelbase time parameters. CFD problem, so I speculate that the author may have found some specific conditions as a calculation example to get such beautiful results in the article..."

"You know, even for the N-S equation, people have found hundreds of analytical solutions under specific circumstances. In terms of Professor Chang's mathematical level, I think this is not difficult..."

"..."

It should be said that Jameson is worthy of being the best CFD expert in the last era.

In almost twenty minutes, he saw the weakest part of Chang Haonan's paper at a glance.

That is, the grid generation efficiency under the Cartesian coordinate system.

However, after all, he is already a CFD expert from the "last era".

As for the power of new technologies in the new era, there has been a misjudgment after all...

Of course, at this point in time, Hertz must still be happy:

"So, our next work..."

"Proceed as usual."

Professor Jameson replied decisively:

"My Synplane model has entered the final and most critical optimization stage. Judging from the current results, the traditional finite volume method is used to fix the coordinate system describing the fluid on the fluid particle and let it move with the fluid. , which can achieve the effect of accurately tracking the evolution of the interface.”

"Currently, my research group is trying to topologically reconstruct the grid to solve the distortion problem caused by this process. It just needs to introduce special node search technology to determine the adjacency relationship of nodes. This part of the work is a bit complicated, but in the end It should be ready for commercial application by the end of this year.”

Facing the dominant position of Torch Group, COMSOL Multiphysics, in addition to adopting a cost-effective strategy, has another important advantage: its extremely fast update frequency.

More than a year after its official launch, the second major version has been launched.

Especially for industry-leading functions, as long as they can pass the performance test, they should be inserted first.

This is attractive to most research institutions.

TORCH Multiphysics is completely the opposite. After the official version 1.0 was released, only three small-scale updates were pushed out. However, its performance is extremely stable. As long as you follow the operation manual, there will be almost no oscillations or divergences.

However, this also causes COMSOL to maintain such high-intensity updates, so the business is under great pressure.

They plan to push another major update at the end of 2001 to increase the software version number to 2.5.

Synplane, a model that can optimize the fluid mechanics and structural mechanics of the entire aircraft at the same time, is the "trump card" of version 2.5.

Therefore, after hearing this assurance, Herz's tense expression finally relaxed.