Feedback on the opening of the Code_Aster forge

by M. Abbas and T. De Soza, EDF R&D / AMA ; P. Halverson

It’s been a year since the forge of Code_Aster has evolved its source code management and build system with modern tools shared by the free software community. As a result, the forge is now open to the outside world and accessible in a repository hosted on BitBucket.

Thanks to this opening, several contributions have been proposed and were easily integrated into Code_Aster. This is the case for example of the extension of some contact features and more recently of the developments done as part of the hackathon organized by Logilab.

Although external contributions had been previously implemented into the code, the feature mentioned above was the first to take advantage of the opening of the forge. It aims to take into account variable gaps in the contact solver (keywords DIST_ESCL and DIST_MAIT) with a function of space and time (up to now only functions of space were taken into account).

This contribution was provided by Dr. Peter Halverson who works for a small medical device company which deals routinely with contact-intensive designs. Their numerical models indeed benefit from the ability to gradually enable contact as a function of time.

After validating the relevance of the contribution, the Code_Aster development team carried out the integration work which was reduced to a minimum thanks to the opening of the development tools and source, that is a simple reviewing and the integration in the document management system of the new manuals.

For more information on the various ways of contributing to the development of the code, one may have a look at the dedicated page on the Bitbucket repository.