FIDAP 8.0 is being released together with GAMBIT 1.0 in mid-1998 and represents a significant step forward for Fluent Inc.'s flagship Finite Element Method (FEM) CFD product. The overall goals for this release are to improve the computational efficiency of FIDAP, particularly the segregated solver, and to provide a stable and flexible platform for future development. As such, major efforts were focused on solver redesign during the Version 8.0 development effort.

Aside from recoding solver routines for improved serial and parallel performance, several important algorithmic advances have been made in FIDAP 8.0. These are: (i) implementation of Jacobi variant of the segregated solver, (ii) reduced stencils in the global coefficient matrices, (iii) optimized storage schemes, (iv) vectorization of the element pass, and (v) single-point quadrature. The net result has been a factor of two to three improvement over FIDAP 7.6 in single-processor run times for large problems, without any significant increase in memory requirements!

The FIDAP 8.0 development project also focused on parallel processing. Parallel versions of FIDAP 8.0 will be made available in a staged manner after the initial release of serial versions. Through the combined use of domain decomposition techniques and MPI message-passing standards, high parallel efficiencies are anticipated.

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