ONELAB: Open Numerical Engineering LABoratory

The industrial and the academic world share a global need for scientific computation software, in many domains from mechanical and electrical engineering to chemistry and biomedicine. While licensing costs for commercial tools are justified for large companies that use them extensively, we have witnessed first hand that smaller, more occasional users cannot justify the costs. Open source software constitutes an alternative ; for scientific computing, professional quality codes of high scientific value are available in various engineering disciplines since the early 2000’s : OpenFOAM [1] for computational fluid dynamics, Code_Aster [2] for structural analysis, GetDP [3] for electromagnetics, ... These codes are competitive when compared with their commercial counterparts, in regard to both their capabilities and their performance [4, 5]. However, these tools still have a marginal impact in smalland medium-size businesses, and in education. We believe that the main reason is their lack of a common, easy-to-use interface (for preand post-processing as well as for parameter input), together with nonexistent or scarce documentation and examples—at least for the codes originating from academia. Also, we believe that industry is still reluctant to adopt open source tools due to the ongoing confusion between “open source” and “limited, unprofessional” freeware. This techno-economical analysis coalesces with the fact that product developers in industry need system-level simulation tools. This means tools with significant multi-physics capabilities, whereas specialized codes like OpenFOAM and Code_Aster remain essentially mono-physics. Existing platforms for multiphysics simulations offer solutions, both commercial (e.g. ANSYS Workbench [6] or COMSOL [7]) and open-source (e.g. SALOME [8] or Elmer [9]). However, the former are again expensive and the latter either lack the sought-after nimbleness and user-friendliness due to a “heavy-weight” topdown design, or lack the ability to interactively interface multiple specialized codes. This led to our design goal for the ONELAB software library, directly inspired by (and based upon) the design of the open-source CAD modeler, mesh generator and post-processor Gmsh [10, 11] : create a fast, light and user-friendly interface to popular open source solvers in order to construct multi-code models with maximum flexibility and efficiency.