CGNS Steering Committee

Meeting Minutes

The meeting was called to order at 7:00pm. There were 11 attendees, as listed below.

The minutes of the 17 May 2001 telecon were approved as posted on the web.

• Steering Committee Membership - no activity
  
  
• Logo - The logo was approved as posted on the web. Diskettes with the art work were made available by Pointwise and distributed to Steering Committee members present. Those wishing a copy of the disk can contact Bob Bush or John Chawner. Members are encouraged to use the logo to identify the Standard.
  
  
• ISO Status - Bob Bush outlined the status of the ISO process. The standard has been assigned the number AP 237 and has been broken into 4 parts: the Fluid Dynamics standard, CFD, Mesh Based Data, and Product data management for analysis. Drafts of the documents are available through the CGNS web site (www.cgns.org).

  At the full CFD Committee on Standards (CoS) meeting, the committee voted to offer to serve as the US body for review for the four parts of the ISO Standard (based on CGNS). If accepted by the US governing body for the ISO process, the AIAA CFD CoS would offer voting advice to the US representative in this area.

  Those present at the meeting felt that it was important that members of this committee familiar with the intent of the CGNS standard review the ISO documents before the October meeting. A deadline of 31 August was set for this review. Chris Rumsey and Bob Bush volunteered to review the documents. Steve Legensky volunteered to review the Part on Product Data Management. Those present also suggest and hope that Charlie Towne, Diane Poirier, Doug McCarthy and Steve Allmaras will be willing to review the ISO documents as well. Bob Bush will send a request for review to these individuals, collect the comments, and reply to Ray Cosner. We encourage anyone else interested in reviewing the documents to do so, sending comments to Bush or directly to Cosner.

  Also at the full CFD Committee on Standards (CoS) meeting, a motion was passed to delegate to the CGNS Sub-Committee the authority to serve as the consensus body for defining an AIAA Recommended Practice based on the CGNS Standard. After some discussion, the Committee members present agreed with this proposal. Chris Rumsey moved that this committee offer to serve as the AIAA Consensus body for defining an AIAA Recommended Practice for storing CFD data. After a second and some discussion, it was felt that there was insufficient attendance to formally vote on the motion, so Bob Bush will coordinate an e-mail vote of the voting members of the Steering Committee. Those present unanimously recommend a vote in favor of the motion.
  
  

• Software Focal Point - Chris Rumsey reported that NASA Langley was moving forward with a small contract to fund Intelligent Light to implement the Chemistry, Linking and User Defined Data in the API. In addition, Steve Legensky indicated that Intelligent Light had submitted an SBIR proposal to support CGNS in the areas of utilities, performance enhancement and adding capabilities. They hope to know the result of this proposal in September, and are recruiting a new person to provide this support.

  Bob Bush indicated that he felt that areas that would benefit from near term support included providing broader developer access to the code (to enable broader participation for development), Cartesian grid support, and the ability to support distributed memory and parallel implementations. Dave Edwards agreed to formulate a team of those interested in parallel capabilities in the API. Interested parties include: Boeing St. Louis (Fisher, Michal), Intelligent Light (Edwards), NASA Glenn (Iannetti), Stanford (Alonso), AEDC (Nelson) and Pratt & Whitney (Bush).

  Armen Darian indicated that the multi-phase and spray extension still needs work, and that he would 'ping' those who have expressed interest.

  Earlier in the meeting, there was also some discussion of whether various implementations are utilizing surface data and boundary data correctly for unstructured grid implementations. This is an issue for post processing where the boundary surfaces must be identified to provide functionality often desired. It was also noted that none of the examples on the web site utilize the surface boundary condition data structures. Dave Edwards will poll those responsible for various implementations and try to generate an example for the web site that contains the preferred mode of storing boundary data for unstructured grid data sets.
  
  

• Reno Planning - Dave Edwards indicated that he was collecting information on the use of CGNS in industry for a paper to be presented at Reno. He also provided an abstract for the proposed paper entitled "CFD General Notation System (CGNS): Status and Future Directions." He is also planning a User's Group Meeting as well as the Steering Committee Meeting.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:30pm.

Attendees