New Release: OpenMDAO 3.6.0

January 17, 2021 by Justin Gray

Version 3.6.0 marks a huge milestone for OpenMDAO. This is the second release in a row where there are no backwards incompatible API changes! Hurray! To celebrate we released our new logo!

Lest you think we just made a release without changing anything … check out the release notes. Here are the highlights

Scaling Reports

In our internal use cases, particularly with Dymos based problems, we’ve been struggling with optimization scaling. We’re starting to look into some more advanced methods for scaling, but the first step to improving things is understanding what you have in the first place. We built a scaling report tool that helps you get that information in one place. To run it, you can call the OpenMDAO command line openmdao scaling <your run script

Tables of data give details on the scaling for your design variables, and constraints

A visualization of the total derivative Jacobian lets you see the sparsity pattern, and the magnitude of the various sub-Jacobians in your model.

N2 Improvements

Include data about which surrogate is used in metamodels
Can now hide the solver hierarchy in the N2 (useful if you want to make slightly lower-aspect ratio movies of the N2)
Included a button to show/hide the design variables, objective, and constraints