lThe advent of unstructured grid technology has brought about significant advances in computational modeling and simulation. Over the past decade several new technologies have emerged that have greatly reduced grid generation time and improved grid quality while extending unstructured grid technology to new applications, such as viscous flow field analysis. These developments have taken place at several institutions, including government labs, universities, commercial software companies, and automotive and aerospace companies. Unfortunately, many of these developments have been incorporated into developer’s private software and often are not widely available outside of a single software package. When the software is available for outside use, it often must undergo extensive modification due to differences in programming languages, data formats and general program structure before incorporation into another grid generation system. These difficulties significantly increase the cost and burden of implementing new technology into a grid generation system and make it difficult to combine grid generation capabilities from multiple sources. As a result, a collection of distinct grid generation tools has emerged over the last several decades. Grid generation users are often forced to select a single tool thereby limiting their ability use all of the available technology on a single problem.
The UGC was formed in 1999 by the Air Force Research Laboratory and The Boeing Company as a forum for facilitating the interchange of unstructured grid technology between various development efforts. Initially, membership in the UGC was limited to government labs and aerospace industry participants. Membership has recently been expanded to include universities and commercial companies. Over the last several years, the consortium has grown into a nation wide organization with over a dozen members. In 2004, the UGC was incorporated as a working group under the American Institute of Aeronautics - Meshing, Visualization and Computational Environments Technical Committee.