We’re proud to announce the release of OpenMDAO 2.3.0. This is a substantial release that comes with many new features. Some of the new features are small, but there are are few major ones. You can read all the details in the release notes, but here are the highlights:
More Speed:
OpenMDAO now has an in-memory assembled Jacobian structure that can significantly reduce the computational cost for computing derivatives and solving for Newton updates when using certain kinds of linear solvers. If you have models with components that provide derivatives via the compute_partials() or linearize() methods, or which use FD to approximate component partials, then you’ll very likely want to use this feature. If you have any models that use the DirectSolver, then you definitely want to use this feature.
Check out the feature doc for assembled Jacobians to learn how to use this new feature. You can also read more generally about how to know if you should be using assembled Jacobians in this Theory Manual article.
If you are doing gradient-based optimization with analytic derivatives, or using our NewtonSolver, then you will really want to check out these docs and test out this new feature. We are seeing better than a 10X speed up for our models!
New docs about how to more efficiently compute derivatives:
We’ve done a massive re-write of the docs relating to how you work with derivatives. There are a bunch of advanced features for speeding up derivative computations that you might not have realized were there because the old docs were not organized that well (sorry!). So, even if you’ve been using OpenMDAO for a while now, we suggest you give the new feature docs a read. If you want to dive a bit deeper into the theory behind the advanced algorithms, we’ve also added some new Theory Manual sections. If you’ve looked over our feature docs on derivatives and are now wondering if any of the more advanced features are useful for your model then we suggest you check out that Theory Manual section.
Not Just Gradient-Based Optimization:
Although our major focus is on gradient-based optimization, we know that there are problems where gradient-free methods are useful. We (finally) ported the DOEDriver from version 1, including support for parallel execution. We also added support for parallel execution to the SimpleGADriver.
Unit conversions:
Sometimes, you want to set or get a value with different units than those with which the value was initially defined. The Problem class now has get_val() and set_val() methods that accept a units argument. As long as the unit is compatible, OpenMDAO will handle the conversion for you when you use these methods.
