CAD/CAM Corner

Autodesk Labs Serves Up Inventor Plastics Preview

Score another interesting piece of technology made available to design tool tire-kickers on the Autodesk Labs Web site. A preview version of the Inventor 3-D CAD tool showcases the Inventor Plastic Features Technology, new capabilities designed to simplify the design of plastic products. The technology, designed to work in conjunction with Autodesk’s Moldflow injection molding simulation products and PlassoTech finite element analysis tool set acquired by Autodesk last year, allows designers and engineers to automatically create thin-walled plastic parts and features such as grills, rests, bosses, snaps, lips, grooves and fillets. Autodesk officials say the addition of the technology is key given the widespread use of plastics as an engineering material. You can check out the preview for free for a limited time on the Autodesk Labs Web site.

NVIDIA Accelerates GPU Power With CUDA 2.0

NVIDIA has done a lot in the last decade to unlock the power of GPUs, with perhaps nothing as potent as its CUDA C language programming environment. With CUDA, software developers can more easily and efficiently write programs that tap the massively parallel architecture of NVIDIA’s GPUs to accelerate computational problems.

Now, the company is following up with CUDA 2.0, a new version, available free for download, that includes support for 32- and 64-bit Windows Vista and Mac OS X along with 3D textures and hardware interpolation—the goal being to increase the efficiency of such applications as medical imaging, product design, scientific research and oil and gas seismic computing. CUDA 2.0 also features an Adobe Photoshop plug-in example, which officials say delivers dramatic performance improvements by allowing developers to design plug-ins that move the most compute-intensive functions of Photoshop to the GPU, including filtering and image manipulation.

One of the more compelling and recent examples of CUDA’s power is Stanford University’s Folding@home distributed computing application. Folding@home combines the computing horsepower of millions of processors to simulate protein folding, which has become a major force in researching cures to life-threatening diseases such as cancer, cystic fibrosis and Parkinson’s disease.

Using CUDA, the Folding@home team developed a client specifically for NVIDIA GPUs, which has delivered more processing power than any other architecture in the history of the project, according to Stanford officials. NVIDIA GPUs are contributing over 1 petaflop of processing power to Folding@home, according to the statistics published by Stanford, and active NVIDIA GPUs deliver over 1.25 petaflops, or 42% of the total processing power of the application. NVIDIA’s petaflop contribution is delivered by just 11,370 of the total active processors used in the project compared to 208,268 active CPUs running Windows, which contribute 198 teraflops or 6% of the total processing power in the project.
NVIDIA and Stanford say that by running the Folding@home client on NVIDIA GPUs, protein-folding simulations can be done 140 times faster than on some of today’s traditional CPUs.

Speedo LZR Racer An Olympic Winner

As the Summer Olympics heats up this week in Beijing, so too is the controversy over how the new  Speedo LZR Racer, a high-tech racing suit designed with help by NASA and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation tools from ANSYS, is propelling athletes to set new world’s records, perhaps unfairly.

Just days into the games, eight records in swimming have been broken, some by improbable margins. For example, during the men’s 4X100m relay, the record was pounded by four seconds, which is huge by racing standards. What all of the winners have in common is the fact that they were wearing the LZR Racer suit, which critics argue delivers levels of buoyancy that give swimmers an advantage akin to the “technological equivalent of doping.”

Say what they will, what the critics can’t argue about is the technological prowess of the swimsuit. Speedo’s R&D group has claimed since its February debut that it’s the “world’s fastest” swimsuit and that assertion appears to on target. The suit is made from a biometric fabric designed to emulate the hydrodynamic characteristics of shark skin. Panels of special low-drag material were laminated onto the suit at strategic drag-reducing locations, which were determined using ANSYS CFD simulation software.

Along with the suit, some say the sophisticated design of the Water Cube, where the races take place, is also aiding in this record-busting Olympic season. The pool is three meters deep compared to most racing pools, which are two meters deep—another factor that aids in speed and buoyancy, they say.