Dassault Debuts HT Body For High-Tech Electronics Design
No longer considered mainly a utilitarian device, consumers are actively engaged in a love affair with their electronics gear, upping the ante for product development teams now tasked with creating seductive designs on top of the traditional engineering challenges.
Call that an opening for Dassault Systemes, which is aggressively trying to promote its wide and varied 3D design, digital mockup, and PLM tools under its 3DEXPERIENCE umbrella into integrated solutions for specific industries. The latest in Dassault’s string of such offerings is HT Body, a broad-reaching platform aimed at engineers and designers in the electronics manufacturing sector and with a specific focus on the enclosures and chassis that are the most obvious hallmark of such devices. Continue reading
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Lagoa Brings 3D Rendering to the Cloud
Those engineers chalking up the cloud to be a passing fancy or a platform that’s ill-suited for professional-class design tools might want to reconsider.
In yet another example of a full-function engineering tool making its way to the latest software delivery model, startup Lagoa has just released a full 3D rendering and collaboration platform, entirely browser-based and running solely in the cloud. Continue reading
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GTC 2013: 8 to 16 Virtual Machines, Hosted in NVIDIA Grid VCA
Mountain climbers know Piz Daint, measuring 9,700 feet, as part of Switzerland’s snow-dusted Ortler Alps. Researchers and supercomputer nerds, however, know another Piz Daint, installed inside the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (abbreviated as CSCS in Swiss). The center is a unit of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where Albert Einstein once studied. Since supercomputers are used for, among other things, accurate weather prediction, the micro-climates of the Piz Daint in the Alps could very well be computed on the Piz Daint at the CSCS.
The supercomputer is a Cray XC30 system. Its current performance is listed as 216 TFlops, according to Top 500 Supercomputers. It’s the largest supercomputing giant Cray has assembled and delivered to date. But it’s about to get faster. When it’s retrofitted with Kepler GPUs, its speed will go up to 1 PFlops (1,000 trillion floating point operations per sec), announced NVIDIA. By early 2004, the Piz Daint will become “the fastest GPU accelerator-based scientific supercomputer in Europe,” NVIDIA noted.
Prelude to GTC: GPU-Based Rendering Speeds Up Visualization
Matthew Gueller chuckled when I asked him if he does rendering, as if to say, “Do you even need to ask?”
Being a professional visualization artist and surface designer, Matthew sees a large chunk of his time consumed by rendering. “Some of the images we have to render — they’re one-to-one ratio, at 72 DPI poster resolution — can take up to 16 hours to finish,” he noted. “Lots of materials involved, large data sets — they’re very CPU-intense.” Continue reading
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Prelude to GTC 2013: GPUs Are Not Just for Pretty Visuals
The GPU was initially conceived as a device to boost visualization, but it has evolved so much beyond its origin that the term graphics processor seems like a misnomer. Today, GPUs are a big part of parallel computing, also called high-performance computing (HPC). They’re fueling large-scale simulation, analysis, and number crunching in scientific research, space exploration, weather prediction, and more. At the upcoming GPU Technology Conference (GTC), NVIDIA plans to expose many other use of the GPU beside producing pretty visuals with dense pixels. (Note: DE is a media partner of GTC.) Continue reading
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