Papers are due 01 May 2002 for this year's conference, to be held 15-18 September 2002 in Ithaca, New York, USA on the campus of Cornell University.

SolidWorks is well established as the market leader in desktop solid modelling offering unmatched performance, value, leadership in innovation and the largest community of users. No other CAD system allows you to get product design work done as quickly and accurately. STAR-CD is recognised for its powers and capabilities as a multipurpose industrial CFD code, arguably it is the technology leader for CFD. The code offers unrivalled ability to handle complex geometries, a wide range of physical models, and fast, accurate solver technology.

At a recent FLUENT Users' Group Meeting, Dr. David Kohlman presented a short course on aircraft icing. The course covered the environmental conditions responsible for icing and a number of deicing and anti-icing systems in use.

Traditionally, aircraft icing was studied by performing experiments in an icing wind tunnel or by flying an aircraft in the wake of a tanker aircraft spraying water droplets. These methods are expensive and time consuming which lead researchers to computational modeling.

But has the GUI been an overall "win" for the CFD industry? Certainly the GUI has lowered the intellectual barrier required to start using CFD and that has opened CFD analysis to more markets -- markets which can't afford to support an in-house CFD expert. By pressing just a few buttons, a novice user can now generate a complete CFD solution without knowing any of the myriad details which lie below the surface. Questions of appropriate boundary conditions, turbulence closure, etc. never arise because all is hidden behind the powerful user interface.

Is using a GUI too easy? One argument is that the GUI, because of its high accessability, promotes uncritical use of CFD modeling. If we don't understand what the GUI is doing, then how can we ever hope to command it successfully? It is at this point that the GUI becomes a hinderance to the CFD process. The user errors it helps correct (the improper location of a boundary condition, for example), only serve to perfect an incorrect model.

Summary information on events, dates and times are directly below. Further details on e-vent content and on-line registration can be found at the e-vent website. Space is limited to 10 "seats" at each of the web events and sorry these events are ONLY AVAILABLE in North America.

The new GPUs deliver powerful enhancements including:

• up to 4 times the performance over previous GeForce generations
• innovative anti-aliasing technology
• nView(TM) multi-display technology

While NVIDIA has focused on the video game market, their products have always performed well for OpenGL-based MCAD operations. The new cards should be strong performers for pre- and post-processing CFD tasks.