In October 2001, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) challenged the acqusitions on the grounds that they substantially lessened competition and tended to create a monopoly in the relevant markets. The allegations gained end-user support when MSC.Software increased the license fee of its NASTRAN software following the acquisition.

Recently, MSC.Software and the FTC came to an agreement, heading off an administrative hearing scheduled to begin Tuesday in a Washington D.C. federal court.

MCAD Cafe has posted an informative article on the whole event which contains further background.

After following these events, the question becomes, when the CFD software industry inevitably follows the same path of consolidation, will the FTC take issue?

Their paper, “Multilevel Error Estimation and Adaptive h-Refinement for Cartesian Meshes with Embedded Boundaries” describes the team’s development of new techniques for error estimation and adaptive refinement for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solutions.

Several features put this new h-refinement strategy a cut above previous adaptive meshing techniques: “It is general enough that it can be applied to any type of unstructured or hierarchical mesh, and, since it is parameter-free, it can be fully automated,” explains Aftosmis. The new meshing strategy was also designated to remove the dependence on user skill, making it quick and easy to generate meshes.

Aftosmis and Berger plan to integrate these error estimation and refinement techniques into their grid generation and solution software package, Cart3D this fall.

Dr. Nagy has held a number of leadership positions at prominent MCAE companies. His 30+ years of MCAE experience includes R&D (Stuttgart), faculty teaching (Princeton), software development, strategic product planning, sales and support (SDRC), end-user management (GE), marketing, sales management, general management, and executive management (MSC, Fluent).

“Dennis brings along a wealth of experience and we’re thrilled to have him on our team,” says Ed Williams, president of Blue Ridge Numerics. “We are confident his unique insight and extensive track record in conducting business in the European markets will greatly strengthen our business activities and help us further capitalize internationally on the numerous customer benefits delivered by CFdesign.”

The conference will include:

• Short courses presented by CFD experts.
• An exhibition of hardware and software products which support CFX.
• The ability to meet with CFX developers, support staff, and management.
• The chance to share experiences with fellow CFX users.

Registration information

Almost every aspect of the T221 is ground breaking. Aluminium is used as the gate material instead of molybdenum and tungsten, the metals traditionally used in displays. IBM's engineers have developed Post-Spacer technology - permanent spacers that provide super-sealing capabilities to prevent light leakage. The more traditional spacer balls are randomly distributed and can cause sparkle effects when they happen to sit within the active area. There is also a new protocol under development called Digital PV Link, which will update only the pixels that have changed - this will significantly reduce the bandwidth requirements.

The monitor retails for $8,399 US.

The Itanium 2 processor is socket-compatible with two future generations of Itanium family processors to allow them to be easily swapped into existing Itanium 2-based systems.

Simultaneously, MSC.Software has released MSC.Linux for Itanium 2 based systems.

“One of the biggest advantages Itanium 2 processors give computationally intensive applications is a bigger addressable space that results in faster calculations, which is critical to users running demanding engineering applications such as MSC.Nastran, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and crash simulations,” said Frank Perna, Chairman and CEO, MSC.Software Corporation.