Orcina news

Here you will find the latest news on the development of OrcaFlex. Alongside our LinkedIn page, it is a valuable source of information about what we are up to!

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OrcaFlex 11.4 released

We are very pleased to announce the release of OrcaFlex version 11.4. The software was finalised and built on 22nd November. All clients with up-to-date MUS contracts will receive, in the week starting 27th November, an e-mail with instructions on how to download and install the new version.

Version 11.4 introduces much new functionality, including:

OrcaFlex

OrcaWave

These are the most significant developments, in our opinion. As always there are more enhancements that are not listed here. All new features are fully documented in the what’s new topics:

Continue reading “OrcaFlex 11.4 released”

OrcaFlex 11.4 user group meetings

Following the release of OrcaFlex 11.4, we can now announce our OrcaFlex 11.4 user group meetings. Once again, we are running these as virtual webinars.

These webinars will cover all the new features introduced in version 11.4 of OrcaFlex and OrcaWave. We will split the content into two separate webinars, one for OrcaFlex and one for OrcaWave. Each webinar will be delivered twice in the same day to give users in different time zones the opportunity to attend.

We anticipate that each webinar will be around one hour in duration, and attendees will be able to ask questions. Recordings of the webinars will be available on our website shortly after they have taken place.

We are running the webinars over Zoom. You will need to register, using the links below, for whichever webinars you wish to attend, using the links below. Zoom webinars can be attended using the Zoom client, or directly from the browser if you do not have the Zoom client.

We look forward to catching up with our regular user group attendees, and hopefully some first timers too!

OrcaFlex new features

This webinar will introduce the new features in OrcaFlex.

TimeRegistration
12th December 2023
0900 GMT		https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0lf6bYAzQ7-uQvrLVIoH9g
12th December 2023
1700 GMT		https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gHvki719SLy1n9B2RlvpZw

OrcaWave new features

This webinar will introduce the new features in OrcaWave, our diffraction analysis program

TimeRegistration
14th December 2023
0900 GMT		https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4W5oBsGESKq_076TVsoiDQ
14th December 2023
1700 GMT		https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_FzCOsEgzS7y199e6lnW0SQ

OrcaFlex 11.3g released

We have just released a minor upgrade to OrcaFlex, version 11.3g. Version 11.3g fixes a number of bugs and adds some minor functionality, including:

  • Support has been added for SHEAR7 version 4.12.
  • Python external functions, post calculation actions and user defined results now support the latest version of Python, version 3.12.

Full details of the changes are described in the documentation:

We intend for this to be the final release of 11.3 because version 11.4 will be released later this month.

Distributed OrcaFlex 8.0a released

We have just released Distributed OrcaFlex 8.0a which you can download from the Distributed OrcaFlex page.

This is a major update containing the following changes:

New job list views

There are now two tabs to view the list of jobs with different perspectives:

Active

The active list displays only the running or waiting jobs, the the same order as the job list in previous versions. However, it has a simplified interface for a quick overview.

Detailed

Batches of submitted jobs are now grouped together under the detailed tab. In this view, more information can be seen about particular jobs, and the order of jobs remains constant (sorted by age).

Batch actions

The new job list structure allows for actions that can be performed on a whole batch at once:

  • Resubmit batch
  • Cancel batch
  • Pause batch
  • Resume batch

High DPI

The UI elements of Distributed OrcaFlex now scale cleanly at any resolution, improving use with high DPI displays.

Status icons

Icons have been added to the job status for readabilty, doubling as a summary of the job list in the status bar.

Proxy client

Previously, each DOF client process on a large machine would communicate individually with the DOF server. To reduce the amount of network traffic, an extra client process is created as a proxy, which collates the messages sent from and recieved by each subprocess.

File operations throttle

In place of the ramping feature, a throttle on the total saving and loading of jobs can be set to reduce the strain on the file server. If the total file operations exceed a certain threshold, the clients will delay the file read and writes by a random interval.

Batch notifications

Users can now be notified when an submitted batch has completed.

OrcaFlex 11.3f released

We have just released a minor upgrade to OrcaFlex, version 11.3f. Version 11.3f fixes a number of bugs, and makes further performance improvements for processing of multiple jobs on machines with large numbers of processors.

Full details of the changes are described in the documentation:

We recommend that all users of 11.3 upgrade to 11.3f.

To upgrade to OrcaFlex 11.3f from any previous version, download the install program from your company’s Orcina software download page. A link to this page was sent to your software administration contact when we released 11.3a. If you do not have access to this page, please contact us.

OrcaFlex 11.3e released

We have just released a minor upgrade to OrcaFlex, version 11.3e. Version 11.3e fixes a number of bugs, and addresses a performance issue for batch processing of multiple jobs on machines with large numbers of processors.

Full details of the changes are described in the documentation:

We recommend that all users of 11.3 upgrade to 11.3e.

To upgrade to OrcaFlex 11.3e from any previous version, download the install program from your company’s Orcina software download page. A link to this page was sent to your software administration contact when we released 11.3a. If you do not have access to this page, please contact us.

OrcaFlex 11.3d released

We have just released a minor upgrade to OrcaFlex, version 11.3d. Version 11.3d fixes a number of bugs, including a significant bug affecting the contents density results variable when using the line slug flow contents method.

Full details of the changes are described in the documentation:

We recommend that all users of 11.3 upgrade to 11.3d.

To upgrade to OrcaFlex 11.3d from any previous version, download the install program from your company’s Orcina software download page. A link to this page was sent to your software administration contact when we released 11.3a. If you do not have access to this page, please contact us.

OrcaFlex 11.3c released

We have just released a minor upgrade to OrcaFlex, version 11.3c. Version 11.3c fixes a number of bugs, including a significant bug affecting certain results variables when using the new tabular contents feature.

Full details of the changes are described in the documentation:

We recommend that all users of 11.3 upgrade to 11.3c.

To upgrade to OrcaFlex 11.3c from any previous version, download the install program from your company’s Orcina software download page. A link to this page was sent to your software administration contact when we released 11.3a. If you do not have access to this page, please contact us.

Distributed OrcaFlex 7.0a released

We have just released Distributed OrcaFlex 7.0a which you can download from the Distributed OrcaFlex page.

This is a major update containing the following changes:

  • DOF can now handle simulation restarts. Restart parents are identified in the DOF Viewer when submitting a batch of jobs and the DOF Server will ensure that the dependency chain is run in the correct order if the ‘Respect restart sequence’ check box is selected when submitting jobs. When adding restart child models, you can automatically include the restart parents if you check the ‘Include restart parents’ check box. The child restart models must be ‘.yml’ text data files.
  • The DOF Viewer can display full details for a selected job in a pop-up window from the context menu. Client machine details can be viewed in a pop-up from the context menu in the DOF Viewer OrcaFlex Clients tab. The DOF Server settings can be seen in a pop-up window by double-clicking the DOF Viewer status bar.
  • The speed of handling of the job status and progress messages in the DOF Server has been improved.
  • The list of DOF Clients kept by the DOF Server is now saved in structured text format (yaml) file. This can be edited to give a DOF Client an alias name for display in the DOF Viewer rather than its machine name.
  • Bug Fix: If a client disconnected during communication with the DOF Server this would cause an error in the server.
  • Bug Fix: A client could fail to provide a MAC address to the DOF Server which meant that the ‘Wake on LAN’ feature would not work.
  • Bug Fix: If a DOF Client was disabled whilst running jobs, these jobs were given a ‘moving’ status but could block later scheduling to that DOF Client if other client machines were busy.

OrcaFlex 11.3b released

We have just released a minor upgrade to OrcaFlex, version 11.3b. Version 11.3b introduces some minor new functionality and fixes a number of bugs. Full details of the changes are described in the documentation:

We recommend that all users of 11.3 upgrade to 11.3b.

To upgrade to OrcaFlex 11.3b from any previous version, download the install program from your company’s Orcina software download page. A link to this page was sent to your software administration contact when we released 11.3a. If you do not have access to this page, please contact us.