Visualisation IT is key to faster success

Radical developments are coming in CAD hardware and software that will allow engineers both to review designs in far greater detail and to perform much more sophisticated analyses, far more quickly. New facilities are being driven by engineers’ increasing requirement to, for example, study designs as a whole, in as realistic a simulated environment as possible, in order to reduce project costs and time scales all the way from concept to manufacture. It’s all about leading edge computing. To set the scene, Dr Eng Lim Goh, SGI’s (Silicon Graphics) chief technology officer says: “Data sets are now growing faster than the affordable bandwidths available to move them. The method which currently interests us most is holographic data storage. We are talking big-customer data sets exceeding 1 Terabyte, and Gigabit Ethernet becoming commonplace in the next one or two years.” On software, he says: “The next big field is the application of ‘occlusion culling’ (removal of model parts not visible)… One has to do a fair amount of computing to establish what is in front of what.” This is not too difficult if the model data set remains fixed, but if it is changed, such as by opening a door, the data set has to be restructured, greatly increasing the load. Fundamental improvements As for the hardware: “We will use cheap commodity graphic cards where available,” he states, but optimised for compute-intensive requirements. “At the present time, companies such as Rolls-Royce talk about taking hours to visualise their data sets,” he says, so the industry has to make massive improvements. And as for how: “Stage one is organising the computing load distribution, and stage two, balancing the load dynamically between different cards,” he suggests. From the other direction, he adds: “If two or more systems access a large data set, they have to use a shared file system. Next year, we will have up to 64 processors accessing a single memory, and we will then be able to link blocks of 64 processors together, using Red Hat Linux... When users want to visualise models with different components in different countries, we presently have to consolidate the model in one place. However, we are working on a storage area network (SAN) which can span model components in different countries.” It’s getting better, faster and cheaper. Brad Reddersen, SGI’s senior vice president, visual systems and engineering, says the firm is developing chip-based multiple RISC processors to quadruple performance. And on the graphics end, the industry’s next development will be of scalable graphics systems in which processing is distributed. In SGI’s systems, the graphics imagery will be ‘assembled’ into an image using ‘compositing’. And it doesn’t stop there; for companies needing to handle the complexity of multiple analyses, Larry MacArthur, SGI’s director of manufacturing marketing, says there is also a move to support ‘multi-disciplinary design optimisation’ (MDO). Current practice of optimising for one function and then the next is liable to lead to a clash; designs that show best NVH (automotive noise, vibration and harshness) behaviour, for example, are unlikely to be optimal for crashes. It’s all about more computing, more complexity and less time. MDO requires running a very large number of simulations to converge on a single final design. Then there’s design for manufacture and increasingly important Six Sigma quality considerations. “No amount of whipping the work force will produce good products if the design is bad,” points out MacArthur. And ironing out those kinds of issues still needs to be done at the design stage, not prototyping. Better, faster CAD will help here too. And it’s not only car manufacturing that’s likely to be the beneficiary; toys, electronic products and even boxes of detergent in a retail setting are subjects of increasingly advanced modelling and visualisation. While countries such as China may be lands of low cost manufacture, business there too is beginning to harness advanced CAD. If nothing else, exchanges of advanced CAD models with high quality visualisation allow Chinese subcontractors to see what’s expected. Similarly, in the reverse direction, they allow customers to see very early on whether subcontractors’ intended products are what was wanted.