Summary: “For the sake of saving our license management resources, we decided to use a commercial licensing solution. It was a key issue that a new solution should have not only equivalent functions to the prior program but also portability between various platforms, simplicity to implement, robustness in actual use, and reasonable cost.”
About National Maritime Research Institute:
National Maritime Research Institute (NMRI), Japan, is the core research institute for ship technologies. It is implementing research on technologies for safe and efficient marine transportation, effective utilization of marine resources and spaces, and marine environment protection.
NMRI delivers various software products to the ship industry. “NMRI CFD” is a major product that is a powerful suite of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) software. Computational Fluid Dynamics is a tool to simulate fluid flows by numerically solving the governing equation of fluid motion (the Navier-Stokes equation). NMRI CFD can estimate various elements of ship performance, such as resistance due to viscosity, waves generated by a ship hull, self-propulsion factors, etc. It is widely used in shipyards and design consultancies for evaluating ship performance in the design stage.
NMRI CFD is composed of three products, HULLDES, NEPTUNE and SURF. HULLDES is a grid generator which can make a structured grid around a ship hull easily and precisely. NEPTUNE is a flow solver which solves Navier-Stokes equations for a structured grid and it can calculate flow fields around ships rapidly. SURF is also a Navier-Stokes solver for unstructured/structured grids which can cope with complex geometry like an appended hull with a propeller shaft and a rudder. Our customers select the proper product from the suite as the situation demands. Customers need purchase only one or two products from the suite according to their own needs.
Licensing at NMRI
We had used a license management program developed in-house using the WIN32API. The program would check TCP/IP address, expiry date, software version, and computational grid size limits. But a growing number of customers increased the burden for us to control issued licenses. In addition, some customers wanted to use 64bit computers or Linux OS. For the sake of saving our license management resources, we decided to use a commercial licensing solution. It was a key issue that a new solution should have not only equivalent functions to the prior program but also portability between various platforms, simplicity to implement, robustness in actual use, and reasonable cost.
Why RLM?
After researching several available licensing solutions from the above point of view, we decided to adopt the Reprise License Manager (RLM). It completely satisfies our demands. We usually issue a server-client type license to customers and occasionally issue a node-locked license for temporary use such as evaluation or demonstration for sales promotion. RLM allows us to spend our resources developing the core technology of CFD software. We believe RLM can help many independent software vendors enhance their own competitiveness with a sophisticated license management system.
For more information about NMRI CFD, please visit the following URL:
https://www.nmri.go.jp/cfd/index_e.html