Editor’s Pick: Simulation and Optimization United, Automated, Distributed

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

We’ve become so conditioned to working so inefficiently that we often take no notice of the fact. Take how you probably use those best-in-class applications for product development. You get the results from one, then you manually cram them somehow into the next program, fix the data-entry errors, repeat, and rinse until you’ve optimized your product. This is a colossal waste of time, money, energy, and talent. But, hey, well, that’s how it’s done. The SIMULIA brand of Dassault is out to put a stop to that nonsense with Isight by enabling you to do all that the way it can and should be done.

Isight provides the intelligence and tools you need to bring multiple, best-in-class, cross-disciplinary models and applications together to create an automatic simulation process flow for exploring design alternatives and identifying optimal performance parameters. It comes with engineering techniques ranging from Design for Six Sigma to Design of Experiments. It has interactive postprocessing tools that help you explore your design space from multiple points of view.

But its real genius is that it brings CAD, CAE, and all this stuff collectively known as engineering tools together. That means you can integrate, say, CATIA, Ansys, Matlab, Excel, whatever—even your own proprietary applications. No re-entering data or exploring it in isolation from the world you want it to affect and assuming you understand how it all fits together. You work the whole of the design—the big picture so to speak—and its constituent pieces as a continuum rather than as separate sets of results. Since Isight automates multiple simulations with all this input, you truly evaluate and investigate multiple design alternatives to discover what you’re doing and where you’re going efficiently.

SIMULIA announced its Fiper add-on technology along with the newest version of Isight. With Fiper, you can deploy and execute your complex simulations over a distributed computing environment. It supports Platform Computing’s Load Sharing Facility (Platform LSF), so you optimize hardware resource usage, providing further efficiency as well as the capacity to execute extremely complex simulations.

I’m banging this efficiency drum because high efficiency is even more crucial to success these days with the economy so tight. Your real takeaway is that Isight enables you to do complex, high-end multidisciplinary simulation and modeling as it should be done in a modern design environment.

You can learn more about Isight and Fiper 3.5 from today’s Pick of the Week write-up. There are links additional data including a webinar series on how Isight can enhance design exploration and quality engineering that I recommend you check out.

Thanks, pal.—Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering  Magazine

Read today’s Pick of the Week