Chapter 1001: Using software advantages to promote hardware development

Because the facts were so clear and obvious, the minor incident when the results were announced was quickly resolved.

However, the afterglow of this episode will linger for a long time...

The next day was the official opening day of the conference.

Since the number of participants in this conference far exceeded everyone's expectations, the two-story conference hall that was booked at the beginning could not fully accommodate them.

To the point that some "less important" people had to be moved to other rooms in the same building and watch the meeting through a closed-circuit television system.

On the scene, but not quite there.

Later, after the Beijing Foreign Affairs Office joined the planning work, it even expressed at one point that it could help coordinate a stadium as the main venue.

However, due to the strong protests from Zhu Yadan and other security comrades, this plan was shelved.

As the initiator, main sponsor and special guest of the entire event, Chang Haonan needed to sit in the separately set up first three rows with more than twenty other important figures.

Or strictly speaking, the middle of the first row.

As an academic conference, you can't set up a perimeter checkpoint with a guard post every three steps and a sentry every five steps.

So the more people there are in the central venue, the more pressure they feel.

Now these few hundred numbers are still within the controllable range.

If there are really thousands or even tens of thousands of people at the same time, we will have to apply for additional measures from above...

In short, the whole plan was finally maintained as it was.

But this also brought an unexpected benefit.

The distance between people has been shortened physically...

"Good morning, Professor Jameson!"

Chang Haonan found Anthony Jameson in the crowd with almost no effort.

The latter was wearing a baseball cap with the brim deliberately pulled down, and he was not sitting in his seat but standing against the wall.

It seems that he doesn't want to be noticed too early.

But with Chang Haonan's voice, which was raised a little, the attention of the people around him was still attracted...

"Uh... Professor Chang, good morning."

Seeing this, Jameson knew he could no longer hide, so he stepped forward and shook hands with Chang Haonan.

Compared to his high-spirited appearance a few days ago, he now looked a little haggard, and even his hair seemed to have turned a little grayer...

"Are you recovering well?"

Chang Haonan's expression of concern showed no sign of falsehood, and his tone was full of sincerity.

We rehearsed it last night.

If this scene was seen by an uninformed person, he would probably sigh and say, "The inheritance of two eras" or something like that.

But only Jameson himself knows the pain in his heart...

"so far so good……"

There wasn't really much that Jameson's body needed to recover from.

But the mental trauma is hard to describe.

"The opening ceremony is about to begin. Let's go to the special guest seats."

Chang Haonan enthusiastically pulled Jameson towards the center of the venue.

As he walked he said:

"I specifically asked the conference team to arrange a seat for you in the middle of the first row..."

"..."

In fact, after learning that the final result was going to be a disaster, Helz immediately bought a ticket and flew back to the United States to prepare for the aftermath...

Uh… the aftermath.

Even Jameson himself had the idea of ​​escaping the meeting by falling ill for a moment.

This is also why he chose not to participate in the event last night, claiming illness.

However, after a night of mental struggle, I finally gave up the idea.

It's too low.

Those who attend the conference are all top practitioners, and they all live in a few concentrated places.

One pass to ten, ten to a hundred.

By the end of the meeting at the latest, everyone will know exactly what happened.

In this case, don't say it's an illness.

Even if you are really sick and cannot attend, others will think that you are shirking your responsibility.

I won’t have to hang around in the academic circle anymore.

On the contrary, if we face the reality, this matter is nothing more than a research loophole.

At most it was a marketing failure, which was extremely embarrassing.

But who among those who do research has never been embarrassed?

As for commercializing imperfect technology...

That was a wrong decision made by COMSOL and had nothing to do with Jameson himself.

At least he returned the funds given by the other party...

However, psychological construction is psychological construction.

When you actually sit in the meeting place, it is a completely different story.

Any look from anyone nearby could make Jameson feel that there was something strange in their eyes.

And any two people talking in low voices together would make him wonder if they were making up a story to discuss him...

In short, it was literally like sitting on pins and needles.

So much so that when the opening ceremony finally reached the stage of announcing the competition results, Jameson even felt a little relieved...

Anyway, you will get hurt if you stick your head out, and you will get hurt if you hide your head.

Then why not let this knife come faster...

……

As the athletes' march sounded, detailed information of the winning teams began to be released one by one on the curtain in front of the conference hall according to their rankings.

As a general rule, the top three receive a trophy, certificate and medal, while the fourth to eighth places only receive a certificate.

Considering that everyone is a respectable person, we did not release the results and rankings of all teams on the spot like we did last night.

Of course, it’s just not there on site.

Similar to the preliminary round, all competition results can be seen on the website, including the engineering files submitted by each participating team.

For a small community like numerical computing, the speed of information dissemination on the Internet is not even as fast as word of mouth...

Although there were only a dozen special guests present last night to witness the release of the results and the subsequent spot check of the results.

But after just one night, this matter was no longer a secret...

Of course, there are always some people who are not very well-informed.

"Come to think of it, how come Stanford University, which ranked first in the preliminary round, didn't even make it into the top eight in the final?"

A participant dressed as a student whispered to his companion next to him.

"You do not know?"

The latter showed a somewhat surprised expression:

"Not only did we not make it into the top 8, we didn't even get any results at Stanford..."

"what?"

The questioner was shocked:

"How...how could this happen?"

Stanford has always been ranked among the top in the United States in the field of numerical computing, and with its dazzling preliminary results, it is seen by many as a favorite for the top three.

"Then I'm not sure... But numerical calculations require a lot of luck and experience, and anything can happen..."

The person being asked was obviously not a smooth talker and did not know the whole story.

Fortunately, another person next to him also interrupted at this time:

"I heard this morning while I was having lunch that not only Stanford, but all the teams that used COMSOL for calculations in this final failed to produce results... It seems that the two-phase flow calculation triggered a bug in their software, resulting in no results at all..."

"You are……"

"Oh, I'm just a nobody, you probably haven't heard of me..."

"Oh……"

The other two didn't seem to take it too seriously.

As a result, the other party changed the subject:

“But the big boss of our lab is Suhas Patankar…”

"Oh?"

With this relationship, the credibility of the previous statement suddenly changes.

"Two-phase flow is a very important part of CFD calculations. If there are serious bugs in this aspect, then the actual stability of COMSOL... I'm afraid it won't be very optimistic..."

"But the preliminary round..."

"The questions in the preliminary round were simple, and they were lucky enough to get the part they were best at, but problems were exposed in the final..."

"..."

Similar conversations were taking place simultaneously in multiple places inside and outside the venue.

Even the award ceremony on the stage seemed a little bleak in comparison.

It's just an award, not for myself.

How can it be more important than eating melons?

Moreover, after being relayed countless times, the content of the message had become obviously distorted.

In fact, COMSOL's computational vulnerability is only likely to be triggered under specific circumstances with high computational weight.

Otherwise, Chang Haonan wouldn't have had to spend so much time setting up such a plan and even "customized" a question specifically for them.

But just one night later, the version everyone heard had become "COMSOL cannot perform two-phase flow calculations."

This was something that even Chang Haonan, the instigator, had not expected...

anyway.

At least in the foreseeable future, COMSOL has completely lost its qualification to eat at the table...

Most people didn't even notice when the awards ceremony ended.

It was not until Chang Haonan began to announce Torch Group’s new plans for the next five years that everyone’s attention was drawn back to the stage.

After COMSOL was actually eliminated, considering that ANSYS had no intention of challenging Torch Group in a large field, but chose to focus on the small field of chemical applications, then for a considerable period of time in the future, the entire numerical calculation industry will return to the state of being dominated by one company between 1997 and 2000.

For users, this may not be a good thing.

Therefore, everyone is paying attention to what actions Torch Group will take next.

“First, TORCH Multiphysics will launch a new version 2.0 and convert the previous 1.0 professional version into an educational version, which will be permanently provided to students around the world for an unlimited free trial.”

As soon as he came on stage, Chang Haonan threw out a trump card.

Of course, TORCH Multiphysics had an educational version in the past, but it was based on the public beta version of that year. Its functions were very incomplete and its UI was basically at the level of 1998, so the user experience was extremely poor.

It is precisely this problem that allows COMSOL to maintain a considerable market share among research institutions and universities.

Now that the 1.0 professional version has been converted into an educational version, it is equivalent to directly blocking the way for later comers to learn COMSOL.

Of course, the Education Edition is literally for educational purposes only.

If you want to publish your research results using software, you must purchase or rent a genuine version.

On the other hand, this also means that the improvements in version 2.0 must be obvious enough.

Otherwise, users who have spent money to use version 1.0 for several years may not agree.

And this is exactly what Chang Haonan is going to say next:

"The upgrade focus of version 2.0 is to introduce a new conservation level set method for interfaces with drastic changes in topological structures, including multiphase interface simulation and topology optimization problems. In addition, a new and more accurate turbulence model is proposed to meet the increasingly sophisticated aerodynamic design requirements. This model can more stably describe the motion of fluid micro-clusters under high flow conditions..."

"Regarding these two specific technical issues, I will elaborate on them in my report later..."

"..."

The release of TORCH Multiphysics 2.0 was announced long before the conference.

But at that time, COMSOL Multiphysics 2.5 version was very popular, and everyone generally believed that this would be a positive expansion of a comet hitting the earth.

Unexpectedly, it ended up being the Torch Group's unilateral cleanup of the battlefield.

Didn’t you see that they also specifically mentioned the upgrade for the two-phase flow problem?

It's totally a corpse whipping.

On the stage, Chang Haonan's speech had not yet ended.

"In the past few years, we have received a lot of feedback from users. The problem is mainly about the compatibility of 3D models and meshing. For this reason, Torch Group has reached an agreement with Dassault Systemes and Kompas to jointly promote the seamless connection between CAD modeling and numerical calculation..."

"In addition, three years ago, Torch Group and Sugon Group jointly launched the Sugon 1000T supercomputer and server cluster, which was more compatible with TORCH Multiphysics software at the hardware level, and received a fairly good response."

"However, since the computing power of Sugon computers was relatively average at the time, the advantage of this combination was mainly in cost-effectiveness rather than performance."

"But as the performance of the Sugon series of supercomputers develops, we will continue this business model of hardware-adapted software. We plan to launch the specially optimized Sugon 3000T within this year. The computing efficiency is one-third higher than that of Sugon 3000, and the Sugon version of TORCH Multiphysics comes with more functions than the professional version..."

"..."

When he finished his speech, the entire audience burst into thunderous applause.

As the final winner of this round of competition, Chang Haonan did not mention anything that worried everyone the most, such as price increases or new payment models.

Rather, the discussion is almost entirely about the further development of numerical simulation techniques.

Many users have taken out their notebooks, written down the name of Sugon Group, and are ready to investigate the details when they return.

As for the representative of Sugon Group sitting in the special sponsor seat, and the representative of the Ministry of Science and Technology sitting in the special guest seat, they couldn't help but smile.

On the surface, this is just a collaboration between two companies.

But in fact, with the continuous increase in revenue from supercomputing and server businesses, Sugon Group can not only solve its own development problems, but also continue to feed back to almost the entire upstream.

Especially the semiconductor manufacturing industry, which was almost strangled in its infancy since the 80s.

Although we are still in the stage of purchasing foreign equipment and raw materials for simple OEM, at least the entire chain from research and development to commercialization has been rebuilt.

This is almost a breakthrough from 0 to 1!