Planned End of Proprietary UNIX Support for Gridgen

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Pointwise plans to cease new development of Gridgen on HP-UX, IRIX, and Solaris. This means that the recently released Version 15.18 will be the last version to support those platforms. Any future versions of Gridgen will only support Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Support for Linux is unaffected by this announcement.

Existing Gridgen customers can continue to use Gridgen V15.18 on HP-UX, IRIX, and Solaris, but should there be a Gridgen Version 15.19, for example, it will be made available only on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. The reasons for dropping Gridgen's Unix support are very simple. Developing, building, testing, and installing Gridgen on those platforms has become a significant burden relative to the size of the respective installed base.

• Our suppliers of tools and components often don't support those platforms. For example, neither the license manager nor the native CAD file readers support IRIX.
• It is difficult to keep some of this hardware in operating condition. For example, SGI announced the end-of-life of IRIX on MIPS in December 2006 and we've been cobbling together used systems since then.

By ceasing new development of Gridgen on Unix platforms and focusing only on Windows, Linux, and Mac for Pointwise and Gridgen, we can concentrate that much more effort on advancing the state of the art in mesh generation and computational geometry.

Questions and comments on this plan should be emailed to gridgen@pointwise.com.