Tuesday, October 7, 2014

FDS 6.1.2 released

A maintenance version of FDS has been released and is available for download at

https://code.google.com/p/fds-smv/

A few things to note:

  1. We are only releasing the 64 bit versions of the software from now on. Of course, the source code is available for anyone who wishes to compile the code. 
  2. We have switched the Windows implementation of MPI from MPICH to Intel MPI. Instructions are in the updated User's Guide. As we discussed in an earlier blog post, MPICH, the free implementation of MPI from Argonne National Labs, is no longer supported under Windows. The new Windows download of FDS has all of the necessary libraries to run Intel MPI and no extra download is needed, however our appeal for beta testing of the software was disappointing. Only a handful of testers volunteered. This is especially frustrating for us because we've heard no end of complaints about the fact that FDS 6 is slower than 5, even though it is more accurate, robust, and so on. If you want the code to run faster, support our efforts to make this happen.
  3. Those of you who have submitted bug reports in the last few months, please go to the Issue Tracker and see if the issue has been "fixed." If so, download the new version and verify that it has been fixed. If it has not been fixed, let us know. For 9 out of 10 issues, we never hear back from the person who originally posted the bug report. Thus, we never really know if the issue has been fixed. Sometimes years later we meet this person at a meeting or wherever and the person tells us that the problem is not fixed. We cannot make progress this way.