Overview of v3.5.4

This release includes a performance increase for BeamDyn and several minor bug fixes. See below for details

Bugfixes

There are numerous bug fixes in several modules. See below for details.

Input File changes

No input file formats change.

Changelog

Overview

This release includes performance improvements for BeamDyn (up to 30% speed increase), python file readers and writers from WEIS, and a fix for stack overflows with FAST.Farm (Intel compilation). A few other minor updates are included as outlined below.

Anyone using BeamDyn will want to update to this version.

General

Build systems

#2311 Always build openfastcpplib as shared. Use BUILD_OPENFAST_CPP_DRIVER to disable openfastcpp executable (@deslaughter) #2173 Fix crash in MAP_End when using Intel's new icx compiler and disable caching in setup-python GH action (@deslaughter)

Python file readers/writers

#2188 Add WEIS file readers and writers (@cortadocodes and @mayankchetan)

Solvers

FAST.Farm

#2452 Fix for some stack overflow issues with FAST.Farm when copying large amounts of wind data (closes #2053) (@andrew-platt) #2340 Add !$ OMP critical around file opening for VTK to prevent file collision (@andrew-platt)

Module changes

BeamDyn

#2399 BeamDyn performance improvements (@deslaughter)

ElastoDyn

#2321 Backport of #2317: Explicitly initialize ED RtHS to zero -- corrects issue with inccorect linearization results (@andrew-platt)

HydroDyn

#2397 HD bug fix: prevent array index out-of-bound error in HDOut_MapOutputs when more than 9 potential-flow bodies are present (@luwang00)

NWTC-Library

#2389 FileInfoType: increase line length allowed (@andrew-platt)

Input file changes

No input files change with this release, as this only includes minor bugfixes.

Full list of changes: https://openfast.readthedocs.io/en/main/source/user/api_change.html

Full input file sets: https://github.com/OpenFAST/r-test/tree/v3.5.4 (example input files from the regression testing)

Precompiled Windows Binaries

The binary files in this release were built with the Visual Studio solution files distributed with OpenFAST (not using cmake), using

• Intel Fortran compiler 2021 (Update 2, w_oneAPI_2021.2.0.243) with Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2019
• Microsoft Visual C++ 2019 (C), for build in Matlab
• MATLAB Version: 9.9.0.1857802 (R2020b) Update 7
• Executables with _OpenMP or _OMP in the name are built with OpenMP libraries and linked with dynamic libraries.
  • You will need this Intel Fortran redistributable package installed to use these executables if you do not already have Intel Fortran OneAPI 2021 installed. See the installation instructions here.
  • You may also need a redistributable library for Visual Studio installed. See instructions here.

The other OpenFAST executables DO NOT require these redistributable libraries to be installed. Instead, they were built with static libraries.