December 2014 Summaries

In 2014, Rescale experienced significant growth, marked by the expansion of its team and the enhancement of its platform. The company welcomed several new members, including engineers and executives, and unveiled a revamped user interface that improved navigation and added features like job-specific visualization, core-to-instance mapping, and multi-threaded file transfers for managing large datasets. Notably, Rescale introduced a public API to facilitate job execution without the web interface, as well as remote visualization capabilities to streamline simulation analysis. The year also saw an increase in hardware options, including new core types, GPU, and Infiniband, alongside the expansion of software partnerships, offering over 100 commercial and open-source tools with on-demand licenses. Looking ahead to 2015, Rescale plans to introduce a GUI-based post-processing option and enhance administrative controls and InfiniBand capabilities, expressing gratitude to their customers, partners, investors, and associates for their support.

In a discussion on the challenges and advantages of mutable state in object-oriented programming (OOP), the text explores the use of types to indicate object state, which can aid in reducing errors and enhancing code maintainability. Through examples from Rescale's codebase, it illustrates how naive use of mutable objects can lead to problems, such as implicit state changes causing code fragility, and highlights a design approach leveraging static typing to make object states explicit and transparent to developers. By using techniques like wrapper classes and lifecycle listeners, the text suggests that code can be made more intuitive, reducing the need for developers to maintain extensive mental context about a system's state. This approach allows for a clearer understanding of object behavior and enhances productivity by documenting possible states through Java's type system, thus streamlining the process of reasoning about code.

Millions of Americans regularly watch football games, experiencing emotional highs and lows, particularly when players like Peyton Manning, known for his occasionally "wobbly" passes, take the field. Despite the wobble, Manning remains one of the NFL's top quarterbacks, prompting Convergent Science and Rescale to investigate the science behind his passes using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and cloud computing. The study utilized CONVERGE™ CFD software, which involves an automated meshing process and Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) to simulate the aerodynamic effects of a football's flight accurately. The research indicates that a lower spin rate results in a more pronounced wobble, but the impact on the pass's distance and stability is minimal, with only slight reductions in distance and drop compared to a spiraling pass. This slight difference can be crucial in gameplay, but skilled athletes like Manning can easily compensate for it, as evidenced by his impressive performance statistics.