The Indoor Environment Department of the Environmental Energy Technologies division has obtained a site license for a general purpose computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, and is interested in hearing from other Lab organizations interested in using the application and helping share the cost of the license.

The name of the code is StarCD, distributed by Adapco Inc. For more information about the capabilities of the code you can check out the website: www.adapco.com. The Indoor Environment Department has been using the software for three years. They use it to model indoor air flow and pollutant dispersion, but the code has many other capabilities including reacting flows and moving meshes. The department chose StarCD from the top CFD codes (including Fluent and CFX/Tascflow) based on results for a sample problem run by each of the companies (they have a conference paper documenting this discussion process and will make it available to anyone who's interested).

However, the annual renewal cost of the site license is becoming burdensome to the research group and they have begun to offer licenses to other people/groups within the EET Division for a $6k/year fee. The group would now like to extend that offer to any LBNL employee or group. The program can be run on any computer, from desktop machines up to NERSC's high-performance computers. The code is well-parallelized to run on NERSC's Cray T3E and IBM SP2 machines, as well as on the Cray J90 PVP machines. Likewise, the software can be run on an Windows NT machine — provided it has sufficient memory. Linux, Sun and SGI workstations are also supported.

If you are interested in learning more about the code or having access to the site license or have any further questions, please contact Elizabeth Finlayson at eufinlayson@lbl.gov or X7179.