Version 3.9’s biggest change is the new serial/distributed api for variables. We now allow you to label individual variables as serial or distributed, which ultimately clears up a lot of confusion when working with distributed memory computations. All of the details are covered in POEM 046. There are lots of other changes in this release, including performance improvements and a few other new features. You can read the release notes for a full accounting, but here are the highlights.
ExecComp Improvements
A small but useful update was made to ExecComp. You can now call the add_expr method on that Component to create new outputs. This change makes the ExecComp API look more similar to the BalanceComp and EQConstraintComps. It also makes for slightly cleaner inputs when you’re using a lot of expressions in your model.
Quieter Warnings
Were you annoyed by the warnings about missing MPI4py or petsc4py? You were not alone! We’ve specifically quieted those two, and you’ll only see them if you try to use those features without the proper packages in stalled. More generally though, we reworked our whole warnings system.
OpenMDAO gives you a lot of freedom, and sometimes that lets you get into trouble. We’ve tried hard to add clear error/warning messages to cover these situations. However, the net result is that sometimes your runs can get kind of noisy. So we re-built our warning system to be more organized, and gave users the ability to limit which ones actually get reported. Check out the docs for the new warning system.
Try to remember, with great power comes great responsibility 🙂 When you suppress warnings you might be missing helpful information. We recommend you leave most warnings on during development and turn them off only for production runs.
