Archive for the ‘Autodesk’ Category
Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
Andrew Cresci, General Manager for NVIDIA talked with AECCafe’s Sanjay Gangal about NVIDIA’s news at Autodesk University 2011.
Sanjay: What brings you to this conference?
Andrew: AEC, Media and Entertainment and Manufacturing are the meat and potatoes of our business. We offer visualization and computation which makes this the perfect show for us.
Sanjay: Tell us about NVIDIA – how much has the company been involved in the CAD/CAM world?
Andrew: It’s the heart & soul of our business – 40% of our business. Autodesk is a big partner with huge volume. Historically, we’ve been providing high quality displays and visualization. More recently, we focused on simulation and rendering. We’re announcing Maximus technology. Because of the collapsing workflow, more people doing more workflow than ever before. People doing solid modeling and rendering multitasking and wanting to do these activities simultaneously. Maximus puts a huge GPU and graphics GPU into the same machine, and so you can keep running Autodesk Inventor or AutoCAD and can kick off 3D Studio Max rendering at the same time. People love this. If you’re running Inventor, it keeps running your analysis as you did before.
Sanjay: If someone says I need a graphics card for modeling or simulation, what’s the most powerful option?
Andrew: I would suggest the Maximus configuration, all the OEMS are shipping Maximus configurations, which is basically two GPUs in the system, one is for graphics and one for computing. Other than that you can ask for Quadro. We do some great Quadro cards all the way from Quadro 600 to 6,000. The cards have 6 GB memory. On the Tesla family of GPUs, there is the C2075, if you want to go down to the card level. Or use Maximus.
When Carl Bass was talking to the press, he spoke of Project Pandora. This is for the 3D Studio Max audience and allows you to render in the cloud. Users have wanted us to build a bigger machine for their rendering. When you click render in Pandora, instead of rendering locally it will render in the cloud. And it will shoot it off to the cloud. It can throw 32 GPUs at this. Something that would take a day and half I can get done in an hour. Pandora is in technology preview, and will release in an upcoming version of 3D Studio Max. It is a joint project with Autodesk.
Sanjay: How do people find out more about NVIDIA?
Andrew: Go to NVIDIA.com
Tags: AEC, AutoCAD, Autodesk, Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk University 2011, computation, graphics cards, Manufacturing, Media & Entertainment, NVIDIA, solid modeling, visualization
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Thursday, December 15th, 2011
James Staten of Forrester Research spoke about the cloud at the recent Autodesk University in Las Vegas. He made a case for the cloud by saying that “clouds are more secure than you are.”
His recommendations:
- Focus – clouds can concentrate their whole security team on securing the one app.
- Exposure – when cloud outages happens every customer gets upset and they end up in New York Times. When your email system goes down it doesn’t show up in the papers. Because of that risk those creating the cloud invest heavily in the best security minds out there. Every one of those was given a job offer by Amazon, Microsoft, etc. at very high salaries. “If anyone breaks into my account I want to know about it. The cloud is concerned with extreme audits, a security expert, who they hire, who gets into the data center, whether they are making sure malware is up to date,” said Staten.
- Validation
- Multitenancy – there is far more encryption in the cloud model and it is far more difficult to see that another customer is there to alleviate concerns of privacy such as Pepsi and Coke using the same cloud service, for example.
Tags: Autodesk University, cloud, Forrester Research
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Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
One of the best parts of Autodesk Media Day yesterday was the Q&A conducted with CEO Carl Bass.
(more…)
Tags: Autodesk, Bill Gates, Carl Bass, cloud, desktop, infrastructure, Martha Stewart, PLM, R&D, Sketchbook, Tinkerbox
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Monday, November 28th, 2011
Today’s Media Day at Autodesk University at the Venetian in Las Vegas attracted 95 bloggers and journalists coming from 80 different countries. Also they expected 8,000 attendees to attend the event.
Chris Bradshaw, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, spoke on the topic, “Autodesk’s Evolving story,” in which he outlined the company’s history in relation to the changing technology.
He said revenues come from all three geographies – more than half the revenue comes from outside North America. Revenue breaks down to 28% from AEC, 24% from manufacturing, 10% from Media and Entertainment and 38% from PSEB.
He talked about how Autodesk was born during a disruptive time period of the mainframe shifting over to the personal computer. Yet today’s times are more disruptive, as the desktop internet went to a billion users. “With mobile devices we’re projecting 10s of billions of units,” said Bradshaw. “Many will have more than one of these things. I would guess many here have more than one mobile device, more than one accessing the cloud.” Which was proven with a show of hands in the room.
Steve Blum, senior vice president, Worldwide Sales & Services, spoke on “Customer Challenges.” He said that with the cloud you can leverage infinite computing and run a thousand different “what if” scenarios is 15 minutes and choose the best design option that meets your needs. The cloud and mobile are changing the way people get their jobs done.
Amar Hanspal, senior vice president, Platofrm Solutions and Emerging Solutions and Emerging Solutions, talked on “The Age of Empowerment.”
“Today we have to look at what do we do when everyone is connected, how do we reimagine this?” Hanspal pointed out that social media wouldn’t exist if everyone wasn’t connected. “The minute we use the cloud, people assume we’re using a vendor made cloud product. What we’re trying to do is use the cloud where it’s useful and adds to the cloud, not cloud for cloud’s sake.”
The cloud is good for Connectivity, Content, Infinite computing, and Design for everyone.
Brian Matthews talked about 3D printing and laser scanning, stating that 3D printing “will change the world.”
Additionally he listed six major technology disruptions:
Reality capture, cloud data, infinite computing, simulation, digital to analog.
See @editorgisaeccafe on Twitter
Tags: 3D printing, AU, Autodesk University, cloud, data capture, digital-to-analog, disruptive technologies, infinite computing, Las Vegas, laser scanning, mobile, reality capture, simulation, what if scenarios
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Tuesday, November 15th, 2011
At Bentley Be Inspired last week, one of the most profound announcements was that of the company’s acquisition of Pointools Ltd. in order to integrate point cloud processing into its entire product portfolio. Bentley plans to merge their code streams with those of Pointools to create a new fundamental data type. Up until now, Bentley has embedded the Pointools Vortex engine into MicroStation, but now they plan to incorporate point cloud processing in their ProjectWise and AssetWise platforms.
This signals an acknowledgement of the importance of Lidar data for various applications, not only for retrofit projects but also for planning and presentation value. The technology has been circling around the AEC industry for awhile but has been hampered until recently by the inability to efficiently get the large amounts of 3D data processed accurately. With great advancements in point cloud processing, it is now being integrated into mainstream CAD products like Bentley’s.
At Be Inspired, many of the winners and finalists were using 3D laser scanning in innovative ways in their projects, for example in the areas of multimedia, water and wastewater, and process manufacturing.
The Pointools/Bentley relationship is not the only evidence of this trend – Autodesk also has announced rather quietly the acquisition of technology assets and and hiring of individuals associated with the Alice Labs technology, according to Michael Oldenburg, manager, Corporate Communications, Autodesk.
The announcement of what Autodesk plans to do with this new acquisition is most likely being saved for Autodesk University, to be held December 28 in Las Vegas.
Another company that has just acquired 3D laser point cloud software is AVEVA, with its recent acquisition of LFM Software. This addition to the AVEVA portfolio offers a comprehensive range of technologies exploiting the power of 3D laser surveying. This technology is said to allow users to import 3D data from various 3D laser scanning formats and export them to plant design systems.
On the path of point cloud processing is ClearEdge 3D, a company that has developed algorithms to identify and extract pipes, walls, structures and other complex building and plant features from point clouds. Their Automated Feature Extraction algorithms are designed to reduce modeling time and eliminate a lot of the manual production associated with 3D models.
This is a topic we will be hearing more about in the near future.
Tags: 3D laser scanning, 3D laser surveying, AEC, Alice Labs, AssetWise, Autodesk, AVEVA, Be Inspired, Bentley Systems, CAD, ClearEdge 3D, LFM Software, point cloud processing, Pointools, ProjectWise
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