MegaCads Release Notes

MegaCads 2.4

Multiblock-Elliptic-Grid-Generation-And-Computer-Aided-Design-System

Release Notes

Release date: 31 March 2000

This is the official release of the MegaCads-2.4 system.

Dear User,

we have finished MegaCads 2.4 !

We integrated a few new CAD and enhanced grid functions and did a lot of tests on our different Unix platforms to provide you with the new MegaCads version more reliable than the last version 2.3

Your MegaCads Team

Olaf Brodersen (cad, grid, integration, support, application, coordination)
Arno Ronzheimer (cad, grid, integration, support, application),
Andreas Ernst (gui, integration),
Peter Niederdrenk (elliptic grid control),
Eike Hoffmann (Iges, web site),

News

CAD / Grid

new version of the enhanced 3d elliptic control function from
new version of the enhanced 2d elliptic control function from Dr. P. Niederdrenk (DLR-GOE),
new version of the 3d elliptic/biharmonic smoothing with multigrid from J. Yan (TU-Berlin),
Searching of Chimera-Hole-Points for FLOWer
Import of "chimnotfound" lines from FLOWer
Linux version for SuSE > 6.0 (with glibc).
data export for the unstructured grid generation system of Centaursoft

GUI

GRAPHICS

MegaEdit

Support for the new MegaCads functions

MegaHelp

Update of several help pages
the latest online help is available on our MegaCads server : (http://beasgi2.ea.bs.dlr.de/megacads/docus/Relnotes.html)

Hints / Known Problems

extensive use of implicit variables can cause segmentation faults

There might be more deficiencies which may cause segmentation faults or bus errors. If you have any problem using MegaCads, don't hesitate to contact us. We strongly need your feed-back to improve continously the software. Please send us an email ( megacads@dlr.de) with a failure description, i.e. the application you used, your operating system and your MegaCads version. Thank you.

Future Developments

The MegaCads research code development is still in progress although current activities focuse on automatic hybrid grid geenration Currently we are working on:

Iges import and direct projection of lines and grids on Iges surfaces

Requirements in Hardware and Software

The current release of MegaCads is supported on the following platforms:

Silicon Graphics systems running IRIX 5.3 or above
DEC AXP systems running OSF/1 2.0 240 or above
HP PA-RISC systems running HP-UX
IBM RISC systems 6000, running AIX
PC systems running Linux
NEC SX4 (MegaBatch only)
SGI/CRAY J90 (MegaBatch only)

All systems must have a flavour of Unix and the Motif toolkit libraries installed (MegaBatch does not need Motif). lesstif on Linux systems is not suffcient. For an improved graphic visualisation OpenGL 1.1 is necessary. Otherwise Mesa will be used.
Please feel free to contact the developers if your hardware platform is not in the list, but fulfills the above requirements.

Documentation

The main part of the documentation is supplied as html-files. It should be read using the online help application MegaHelp, which comes with your copy of MegaCads. These documents can also be read and imported by World Wide Web browsers as well as many text processing programs. If you prefer a printed manual, you can use MegaHelp to create paper copies of single documents. MegaHelp supports ASCII and Postscript (TM Adobe Inc.) printers.

Literature

O.Brodersen, A.Ronzheimer, R.Ziegler, T.Kunert, J.Wild, M.Hepperle:
Aerodyanmic Applications using MegaCads.
Proc. of the 6th International Conference on Numerical Grid Generation in Computational Field Simulation, 6th to 9th July 1998, Ed. M. Cross, P.Eiseman, J. Häuser, B.K. Soni, J.F. Thompson, University of Greenwich, London, England, 1998, pp. 793-802
O.Brodersen, M.Hepperle, A.Ronzheimer, C.C.Rossow, B.Schöning:
The Parametric Grid Generation System MegaCads.
Proc. of the 5th International Conference on Numerical Grid Generation in Comp. Field Simulations. Ed. B.K.Soni, J.F.Thompson, J.Häuser, P.Eiseman, NSF Eng. Center, Mississippi, 1996, pp. 353-362
P.Niederdrenk, O.Brodersen:
Controlled Elliptic Grid Generation.
in New Results in Numerical and Experimental fluid Mechanics II, 11th AG STAB/DGLR Symp., Notes on Numerical Fluid Mech., Ed. W. Nitsche, H-J. Heinemann, R.Hilbig, Vol 72, Vieweg 1998, pp.339-346
P.Niederdrenk:
On the Control of Elliptic Grid Generation.
Proc. of the 6th International Conference on Numerical Grid Generation in Computational Field Simulation, 6th to 9th July 1998, Ed. M. Cross, P.Eiseman, J. Häuser, B.K. Soni, J.F. Thompson, University of Greenwich, London, England, 1998, pp. 257-266
J.Yan, L.Xue, F.Thiele:
Performance of Multigrid Method in Biharmonic Grid Generation.
Proc. of the 6th International Conference on Numerical Grid Generation in Computational Field Simulation, 6th to 9th July 1998, Ed. M. Cross, P.Eiseman, J. Häuser, B.K. Soni, J.F. Thompson, University of Greenwich, London, England, 1998, pp. 303-312

Operation

MegaCads is using the widgets of the Motif toolkit to offer an attractive user interface. This means an optical pleaseant appearance as well as an intuitive, easy to learn user interface. If a working installation has already been installed on your system, you just have to make sure that the environment variables are set and that the resource file has been read into your X-window server (see configuring MegaCads).
To set the environment variables and to load the resource file (MegaCads.rsc) into your X-window system, you can execute the C-shell script environment, which is located in the TOOLS directory of your local MegaCads installation.
If you want to do some real work, you should create a new project directory where MegaCads will store all intermediate files and results. Now you are ready to type mcads at the Unix command prompt.

Release Notes up to now

Version 2.1

Version 2.2

Version 2.3