An analysis tool for planes and sails operating at low Reynolds numbers
flow5 is a potential flow solver with built-in pre- and post processing functionalities. Its purpose is to make preliminary designs of wings, planes, hydrofoils and sails reliable, fast and user-friendly.
Certain types of (numerical) problems are very parallel in nature. LLMs, for example. But obviously not every problem is. And sometimes a parallel solution isn't the most efficient.
Context from the homepage (https://flow5.tech):
An analysis tool for planes and sails operating at low Reynolds numbers
flow5 is a potential flow solver with built-in pre- and post processing functionalities. Its purpose is to make preliminary designs of wings, planes, hydrofoils and sails reliable, fast and user-friendly.
With so many things being called Flow these days, this one is probably the most fitting.
Source code: https://github.com/techwinder/flow5
Make it work for paper airplanes and you have a nice teaching tool.
>Performance scales with the speed and number of processor threads.
music to my ears. I wish more software had similar rules.
Certain types of (numerical) problems are very parallel in nature. LLMs, for example. But obviously not every problem is. And sometimes a parallel solution isn't the most efficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel
We used sail7 for our sailboat, and this was already open-sourced. https://xflr5.tech/sail7/sail7.html
Curious that this hit the front page.
What kind of projects is this software used for?
> Its purpose is to make preliminary designs of wings, planes, hydrofoils and sails reliable, fast and user-friendly.
From the main project page. So it’s for designing aircraft, mostly.