Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Using Elmer 3.0 on Mac OS X -- Comment()
Here are two screen captures of Elmer 3.0 on Mac OS X:

A downloadable version of Elmer for Mac OS X 10.3 is currently in test use. The tar.gz archive is 40 MB in size. I installed this version on my account on the PowerBook, and everything seems to work. I'll try to install Elmer on the iBook at home also. Now I can do serious multiphysical modeling on Mac OS X.

-- Comment()
I'll be at GNU/Linux Summit '04 in Helsinki on Thursday and Friday. I hope to improve my understanding of Linux in business. And what is the state of the Linux community at the moment?

-- Comment()
Biologist quits research, earns more money fitting gas boilers: "Karl Gensberg, 41, has been a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Birmingham for 13 years discovered his plumber earned more money. So he retrained as a boiler fitter, so what is everyone planing to retrain as? Janitor, carpenter, wine maker?" [nodalpoint.org - A bioinformatics weblog]

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Apple's Elusive Corporate Configuration: "[The] enterprise-computing push [at Apple] has yielded little, and the exec leading it has quit. But here's how Jobs & Co. might still fulfill the dream." (BusinessWeek via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

Porting Elmer 3.0 to Mac OS X -- Comment()
Elmer is a is a computational tool for multi-physics problems. It has about 300 000 lines of code: Fortran 90/95, C++, C, and Tcl/Tk. Previously only Linux and Windows versions were available. But it took only two days to port the code to Mac OS X 10.3.

The porting of the code was done on my PowerBook G4 while I was using it. The software developers logged in via ssh, transferred the source code, compiled, fixed problems, and did the test runs. (All tests seem to have passed.)

The funny thing is --- I didn't much note when the developers did their work. The PowerBook was as fast as it usually is. Once in a while I checked with top to see if the developers were actually doing something on the system. And then I was told that the port of Elmer was complete, including the X11-based graphical interface. Suprise!

Elmer has been developed in collaboration with Finnish universities, research laboratories and industry. Here are examples of things which you can solve with Elmer:

Heat Transfer
Solid mechanics
Fluid mechanics
Electromagnetics
Acoustics
Quantum mechanics
Coupled problems
Czochralski crystal growth
Simulation of micro-electro-mechanical (MEM) components
Optical fiber manufacturing
Linear algebra

The user interface is not polished at all. In fact it looks ugly. But beneath the surface there are state-of-the-art numerical algorithms for FEM-based modeling and for solving those models. Next, I have to learn how to use Elmer.

I believe a downloadable Mac OS X version of Elmer will soon be available. And the Mac OS X version will be available free of charge to academic users.

Grid workshop in Finland (CSC, Espoo, Finland, March 31, 2004) -- Comment()
CSC and NDGF organize a Grid Workshop: "[...] to expand the user base in grid-computing activities. The workshop is targeted at scientists with interest in running their applications in a grid environment. It is oriented towards practical usage, introducing grid computing concepts and tools on the NorduGrid platform. The workshop consists of an open lecture session in the morning and a hands-on tutorial session in the afternoon."