DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

Myself and the legendary Greg Corke had a conference call and web demo with the Autodesk team yesterday to look at the first iteration of its cloud-based computation tools for simulation. Currently in closed invite-only Beta, the two projects, Centaur and Cumulus, are the first pass at using remote computation technology to speed simulation. Whether you want to call it a Cloud app, call it SaaS (Software as a service) or call it SRDFBCSE (Stuff Running Dead Fast on a Big Computer Somewhere Elsewhere), this is a serious trend and we’re finally starting to see demonstrations of how things are going to pan out over the coming years. But let’s break it down a little and get some clarity.

Project Cumulus

This is a remote solver for Moldflow - that’s pretty simple. You use the standard client for Moldflow Insight (rather than the Inventor integrated version) to carry out your traditional pre-processing and study set-up. Geometry is worked on, a mesh created, inputs and parameters set. you then send this data to ‘the server’ and it calculates it. Once complete, it send back the results dataset and you use the same client software to inspect, to validate and interact with the results.

Project Centaur

This follows a vaguely similar pattern. you download an Add-in for Inventor Simulation that deals with optimization. You set-up your geometry, add the loads and constraints, choose the variables for optimization from the inventor model (at present, you need to define each variable’s inputs). Essentially, you use a design of experiments methodology to define the values for each variable and set a goal. At present it only works with a Factor of safety type analysis so the inputs are pretty standard. once done, you hit the calculate button, this send the data to the calculation server, the optimization iterations are performed and the results are streamed back to your Inventor client on your workstation. You look at the results from a pretty clear list and choose the configuration you want.Inventor adapts the model in work to that configuration, adopting those chosen inputs for the geometry and it’s saved. Job Done.

Before we get onto what this means and the potential here, I did want to get Greg Corke, our resident hardware guru’s thoughts on what he saw. So, here you go - i’ll be back once you’ve read this:

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