When I was an undergraduate at Pine State University, all engineering freshmen had to take a programming course. We could pick between Fortran, Pascal, and C++. From what I recall, most civil and mechanical engineering students took Fortran because that's how you crunch numbers. I chose C++ and liked it so much I willingly took … Continue reading Counting Flops →

The FourNodeQuad was one of the first, if not the first, solid elements in OpenSees. Despite the element's mediocre implementation, the coding style was copied by others into subsequent solid element implementations. Fortunately, before that copying happened, I revised the implementation to be more computationally efficient--and I was kind enough to leave the original author's … Continue reading Unrolling the Four Node Quad →