CAD
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
A stark contrast between the advantages of hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs). When it comes to thinking about what should go in our workstations, we — both hardware suppliers and users— too often dwell on the glitzier technology inside, the “speeds and feeds.” How many CPU cores or GPU shaders there are, what frequencies they’re clocked at, and how many polygons/second or texels/second the GPU can churn through. But just as often as any of these specs might be the bottleneck in your CAD workflow, so might something far less glamorous, like disk I/O performance. To maximize throughput, for both you and your workstation, all the components in your system need to be up to snuff, even — or in some cases especially — your machine’s storage. And what sort of storage subsystem should CAD professionals be considering today when configuring their workstation?
CAD Workstation Storage, Part 1: The Evolving Tradeoffs Between HDD and SSD « CADspeed
We love to make stuff and meet interesting people, and we love to help other people make stuff and meet interesting people. That's pretty much it.
EngineerVsDesigner EngineerVsDesigner -
My new bff*, Cadenas, put together a couple videos on the new Solid Edge Part Community . Now they are kind of a quiet lot but if you are in a cube with a bunch of engineers trying to get some work done, this is good. So click below and see what’s new. And if you like what you see, try it today.
Get your Solid Edge Catalog Parts….Now! | Siemens PLM Software Blog
Home > Hard Drive , Mobile Workstations , Workstations > The Advantages of Solid-State Drives for Solid Edge and Other CAD Applications A few of us CAD folks are experimenting with solid-state drives ( SSDs ), since they give fast boots and quick launches of Solid Edge (and most other high-end software programs). However, SSDs cost more than traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), so only a lucky few are getting them. SSDs use solid-state memory to store data and provides access just like a traditional block i/o HHD. However, SSDs use microchips to retain the data, which contain no moving parts. In contrast, HDD are electromechanical devices with spinning disks and movable read/write heads.
The Advantages of Solid-State Drives for Solid Edge and Other CAD Applications « CADspeed
Siemens PLM and Synchronous Technology in Solid Edge | engineering-matters.com
There certainly has been a lot going on in the CAD industry of late. It seems as if just about everyone has been talking about adding or integrating direct modeling into what they offer. Thinking back, direct modeling and feature-history modeling have both been around for some time.
Dave Ault writes: Sitting here this morning pondering the upcoming Solidworks convention and the Dassault Systemes obsession with the cloud, I have a list of unanswered questions. Personally, I see nothing but downsides to this whole cloud thing and would really like to stop it dead in its tracks. It is my opinion that most CAD users have not really thought much about what could be coming down the pike to them soon; the trendy bunch can't seem to get past how cool this will all be -- without thinking of practical answers for just how is all this wonderful stuff really supposed to work.
Dave Ault asks 40 tough questions about the cloud. We've got all 40 of them - WorldCAD Access
Following up on announcements we made at SolidWorks World 2010 - The SolidWorks Blog
Eight months have passed since we took the stage at SolidWorks World in Anaheim and talked about cloud technology and the benefits it can bring to the product design process. As I travel around the world talking to companies and visiting user groups, I’ve noticed the same questions keep coming up, and I wanted to address some of them directly. First, people are asking what this “cloud” thing is all about In a nutshell, “cloud computing” leverages the Internet to shift processor-intensive tasks from the desktop to more-powerful remote machines. We’ll talk more about technology later, but if you want to learn more now, this blog post by Faisal Ghadially does a nice job of exploring the different options.Editor’s note: This article has been adapted from an article that originally appeared in benchmark , a NAFEMS publication. For more information, visit nafems.org . NAFEMS, an independent member organization dedicated to computer modeling and simulation methods, asked engineers what mangers needed to know about finite element analysis (FEA). Selected responses are below. Contributors are mainly stress engineers or engineers from similar disciplines.
25 Things Managers Should Know about FEA by Desktop Engineering
Advance Your 3D Software Development Career at SpaceClaim
SpaceClaim is an early-stage, venture-backed firm located in Concord, Massachusetts. We are looking for individuals with the skills, experience, and energy to make a key contribution to the development of breakthrough 3D mechanical design software. We offer a competitive compensation package including health benefits.
CAD Blogs
unnamed pearl
An essential guide for design engineers who use the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) during the product development process, this book turns the FEA into a productivity tool that will help to avoid costly and potentially dangerous mistakes. During the 50 years of its development, FEA evolved from an exotic analysis method accessible only to specialized analysts into a mainstream engineering tool. Phenomenal progress in computer hardware and operating systems combined with similar progress in computer-aided design made FEA the tool of choice for design engineers, who now use it during the product design process. Many books have been written about FEA, however very little FEA literature takes a middle ground approach and specifically addresses the needs of design engineers who use FEA as an everyday design tool.
Building better products with FEA presents an alternative to the highly mathematical treatments that are normally associated with this topic. With a minimum of mathematical formulae and plenty of practical examples, the novice analyst can gain a thorough understanding of the techniques and know-how that is required to perform a successful analysis. In addition the book concentrates on the fundamental reason for FEA: to enable the designer to understand how his product behaves and to go on to make better designs. The book starts by giving an overview of the common types of classical engineering analysis including, free body diagrams, moments of inertia, stress and strain, beam theory, failure theories and dynamic analysis.
unnamed pearl
CADVille post for April Fools day - Siemens PLM Software Blog
Yesterday for April fool's day, I released a blog post about a fictitious product called CADVille. This was a running joke within the CAD community on Twitter and I thought this might be a fun post. I sent out a tweet asking some of the CAD bloggers if they wanted to participate and got a few replies. The joke quickly got a life of its own catching both me and my company by surprise.I know that most of you will consider the title of this post as being a contradiction in terms. I hope to show you otherwise. We are certainly seeing the makers of history-based parametric CAD tools attempting to add explicit like or direct modeling type functionality to their history-based systems. Unfortunately many complications can evolve in the model when direct geometry edits are made to a history-based model. Maybe someday the issues will be worked out.