CAD/CAM Corner

3Dconnexion Survey Touts 3-D Mice Productivity Gains

Admittedly, this tidbit is self-serving, but interesting all the same. 3Dconnexion, a Logitech company, just released the results of a survey, which found that CAD design engineers are more productive and efficient when using 3-D mice. The survey, conduced by independent market researcher MarketLab, polled 190 3Dconnexion mice users, garnering feedback on a variety of issues regarding their experience with 3-D mice when using leading CAD applications like SolidWorks and Autodesk Inventor.

More than 80% of respondents said that using a 3-D mouse increased their productivity, most noting an increase within the first week of using their 3-D mouse. In addition, almost half of the respondents said their overall productivity increased by 20% or more. More than 80% reported that using a 3-D mouse made it easier to identify problems associated with a design. The other big win for 3-D mouse users: More than 70% of those surveyed said their 3-D mouse reduced discomfort when navigating designs, allowing for longer design sessions.

Unlike traditional mice, 3-D mice let design engineers move in all three dimensions simultaneously, using six degrees of freedom. Users gently lift, press and turn the controller cap to pan, zoom and rotate without stopping to select commands.

Still skeptical? Check out the findings from the survey yourself in a white paper, “The Economic Payback of 3D Mice for CAD Design Engineers.”

PROTOTYPE THIS! Series Makes Innovation A Discovery

If you’re sick to death of the reality and dumb games shows crowding the air waves this summer, Discovery Channel’s  fall programming lineup is offering a welcome reprieve.

The new PROTOTYPE THIS! 13-part series kicks off this October, providing viewers with the opportunity to live with a team of engineers through the design process—from the early drawing board stage through production and view all the ups and downs along the way. The series, shot entirely in high definition, features a so-called dream team of electronics specialists, engineers, professors and special effects experts who combine their various talents and ideas to create forward-thinking products that tackle the modern inconveniences and problems we all confront on a daily basis. Some of the innovations on tap for the series: a road rage-proof car, a six-legged robot that carries a human through any terrain and a waterslide simulator that provides an amusement park-like thrill ride from the comforts of home. Perhaps the most out there is a high-tech alarm clock that, get this, provides the usual wake-up chime along with an automated shower, valet service and mechanized butler to kick you out the door. Now couldn’t you use one of those?

IBM Eureka Has NVIDIA GPUs At Its Core

How’s this for one big high-performance supercomputer: The IBM Blue Gene/P Intrepid at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, will soon earn the distinct honor not only as being the fastest computer in the world for open science, but also to be among the few to boost heavy-duty data analytics and visualization capabilities.

Argonne just awarded GraphStream Inc. a contract to make data analytics and visualization at this scale possible via the world’s largest installation of NVIDIA Quadro Plex S4 external GPUs. This new supercomputer installation, nicknamed Eureka and comprised of 104 dual quad core servers equipped with 208 Quadro FX5600 GPUs in the S4s, will allow researchers to explore and visualize the data they produce with Intrepid.

In just over a minute, Intrepid can produce the equivalent of 1,000 DVDs of data; the additional analytics and visualization capabilities will help scientists plow through this massive pool of data faster than before allowing them to uncover new insights, according to officials.
 
GraphStream, a supplier of scalable computer systems, will use the NVIDIA Quadro Plex (S4) visual computing system as the base graphics building block. Four high-end graphics cards will be placed in 1U “pizza box,” and this cost-effective configuration handles all the power and cooling issues associated with the graphics cards.