CGNS Steering Committee

Telecon Minutes

The meeting was called to order at 2:00 Eastern time. There were 14 attendees, listed below.

• Charter/Membership - Michael Marchant from CFX/AEA Technology attended the telecon for the first time. Mike introduced himself as the Meshing Team Leader and indicated that CFX now supports import and export of CGNS files. They would like to become more active in the Steering Committee. Diane Poirier indicated that she would add them to the list of applications on the web. Welcome Mike.

  Not mentioned at the telecon, the charter has been updated on the web to include the current list of steering committee members.
  
  

• Issues - There will be an informal meeting at the AIAA summer conferences in Anehiem Calif. We have requested a room for Tuesday evening at 7:00. The room number should be posted at the conference. We welcome all who can attend. (7 of the attendees indicated that they would attend the Anaheim conference, so we anticipate a reasonable turn-out for the meeting.) An agenda will be sent to the entire committee before the meeting.

  Discussions on if CGNS should be published as an AIAA Standard are still underway. There will be a telecon on this subject between Ray Cosner (AIAA CFD Committee on Standards), Jim French (AIAA Staff) and Bob Bush (CGNS Steering Committee) on 29 May. Bob will report the results of the discussion at the meeting in Anaheim.

  Dave Edwards reported on progress in preparing for the Reno conference in January. He thinks it would be timely to have another technical paper on the status of CGNS, and can arrange for an invitation for the ICG session. Dave will be sending out a questionnaire to collect data for the paper. We also discussed the idea of having a Steering Committee and/or User's meeting. We tentatively decided to hold a one-hour Steering Committee meeting before a publicly announced User's meeting.
  
  

• ISO Status - Ray Cosner could not attend, but sent the following report:

  The next meeting of ISO Standing Committee 4 will be June 11-15, in San Francisco. This is the group whose responsibility includes the Fluid Dynamics standard. I expect this will be a fairly low-key meeting from the Fluid Dynamics perspective - no major decisions are to be made at this one. The primary activity will be to continue the process of reviewing and updating the drafts of the standard. Since the previous meeting of this group in February, we have been receiving comments and updating the documentation. All the comments received have been minor. People in several countries have agreed to put in some time at their own expense to help us develop the standard. Those countries are: US, UK, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, and Germany. The next meeting of Standing Committee 4 will be in October, in Fukuoka Japan. This will be a major meeting for the Fluid Dynamics standard - we hope to pass Gate 3 (Committee Draft) for all the parts of the AP 237 standard. To do this, we will have to have a draft we consider to be complete in all respects. Once we reach that stage, we will have to institute a formal process of recording and responding to all comments we receive. Our response can be 'we received your comment and we choose to ignore it' (not a bright idea) but we have to respond.

  Ray also sent the updated documentation to Bob Bush for comment and review. This information will be forwarded to Diane Poirier for inclusion on the Web site. All members of the committee are urged to review this documentation to ensure consistency with the intent of making a smooth transition of CGNS to an ISO standard.
  
  

• Logo Status - John Chawner could not attend, but indicated via e-mail that the logo has been revised and is ready for approval and posting. An initial version has been posted on the web, and some minor comments of John's addressed.
  
  
• Documentation - Charlie Towne indicated that an HTML version of all the documentation is now available on the web. He is also working on a revision to the Mid-Level Library documentation that will hopefully make it easier to use.

  Chris Rumsey indicated that he has gotten little feedback on the draft User's Guide. However, it has been used by some groups, and has been helpful in providing answers and a reference for several listbot questions that have come up.
  
  

• Software Support - There has been little progress in identifying a Software Focal Point. Doug McCarthy could not attend the telecon, and there is no progress on drafting a contribution strategy as a potential source of funding for Software Support. On the positive side however, the listbot has been a great help in getting questions answered. Our biggest need now is to implement extensions that are ready, and to provide a mechanism for bug fixes.

  In the mean time, all parties are encouraged to continue to work on gaining consensus for the various extensions. We would like to get the extensions to the point where they are well enough defined to begin implementation and the documentation is ready for inclusion in the SIDS. (However, we do not anticipate updating the SIDS until the extension has been implemented.)
  
  

• Extension Status - There was brief discussion of the various extension proposals. Many are somewhat stagnant and need to be re-invigorated. Currently we rely on the originator to keep them moving.
  
  
  • Chemistry - Bush - Ready for implementation
  • Rotating Coordinates - Bush - Ready for implementation
  • API Link support - in SIDS - Ready for implementation
  • User defined arrays - Rumsey - need to choose a strategy
  • Hierarchical structures - Patel
  • Hanging Nodes - Edwards
  • Spray/2phase flow - Darian
  • Wall Functions
  • Turbomachinery BC's
  
  
• Utilities - Ed Hall indicated that he is still interested in pursuing generating various utilities to operate on CGNS files. He indicated that CGNS support has been added to the OpenGL version of PLOT3D that is now being supported by NASA Ames (Stuart Rogers - rogers@nas.nasa.gov). He would also like to develop a Viewer/Editor based on JAVA, and has internal funding but no manpower at this point.

  David Edwards indicated that Intelligent Light has developed a CGNS inspector for their internal development that might serve as a good starting point for Ed Hall's activity. He was encouraged to send it to Diane Poirier to make it available as a download from the Utilities page.
  
  

• Additional - Release Status - Diane Poirier indicated that we are ready to release V2 beta2 as the production V2, and will take the beta designation off the web. For the present we will retain the older versions of the software on the web as well.

Attendees