Passion, Collaboration and Innovation

Passion, collaboration and innovation were the 2001 spearheads of Dassault Systemes and here is the evidence:

• The launching of the Software Community Program, the V5 development partnership program, dedicated to Independent Software Vendors willing to develop and sell V5 based solutions to support 3d PLM. Within this program software partners leverage the V5 architecture to develop applications fully integrated and complementary to CATIA V5, ENOVIA V5 and DELMIA V5.
• The announcement of the Software Community Web site: http://www.dsweb.com/community/software.
  1. A community for software partners (and more specially developers) to collaborate around CAA V5. It provides a single, online access to all CAA V5 deliveries through the Web (Forum, hotline, support)
  2. A B2B portal to promote the DS software partners' V5 applications by providing all necessary information about partners and their products (brochures, demos, direct contact)
  3. A dedicated and privileged section for software partners including online support, licenses management; sales report, plus a marketing aspect (DS logos, brochures, goodies, presentation, tips & hints)
• The arrival of 25 software partners (15 Gold Partners & 10 Partners) within the SCP. These are leading companies that chose the V5 architecture to best serve the V5 customers' specialized needs. Their products are fully integrated and complementary to DS 3d PLM solutions.

DS has also great expectations for 2002. And the beginning is promising with three new partners already on board:

• REALVIZ that will deliver for the first time a V5 integrated solution-enabling customers to integrate their 3D virtual products in real environment.
• INCAT that will deliver a V5 fully integrated solution for data or design quality validation.
• TransCAT will develop and sell two products that will offer data quality checking capabilities for CATIA V5 thus allowing perfect industry standard compliance for 3d PLM users.

If you want to get the latest and the most updated information, connect to http://www.dsweb.com/community/software. And enter a world of passion, collaboration and innovation.

CSC to Offer PLM Solutions with New Competency Center

The growth of PLM software and services is highlighting demand for applications that allow engineers and manufacturers to exchange product planning, design, manufacturing, and distribution data. Along with its ability to reduce cycle times and accelerate product development and delivery, PLM also provides a key building block for future e-business initiatives. Few aerospace companies doubt the value of implementing PLM - average savings tend to be about 30 percent - but the costs of upgrading hardware and software, together with those of transforming legacy data and establishing integration with vital business processes, can often pull the risk curve into dangerous territory.

Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has been providing comprehensive PLM IT (Information Technology) services to the Aerospace and Defense industry for many years. Benefiting from CSC's experience in PLM process and technology change are such leading companies as General Dynamics, Raytheon, United Technologies Corporation, BAE Systems, Boeing Space Systems, and Lockheed Martin. PLM services provided to these companies and many others include infrastructure design and management, software procurement, installation and deployment, software customization, and database administration.

In response to the growing demand for comprehensive PLM solutions, CSC is leveraging its vast experience and success into becoming a premier provider of complete PLM solutions. One of the first steps that CSC has taken is the establishment of a PLM Competency Center for exploring infrastructure, hardware and software configurations for PLM. The Competency Center is one tangible benefit of the Strategic Alliance formed between CSC and Dassault Systemes last year. It will provide a critical resource for companies making the transition from CATIA V4 to V5, for those with a vested interest in Enovia integration and those looking for proof-of-concept PLM demonstrations and prototypes. The new version of CATIA, which for the first time runs on the Windows platform, holds promise for increasing the number of users with access to the product design data - a key element in successful PLM implementation. The Center houses AIX/UNIX and Windows 2000 servers and clients along with the most recent versions of Dassault Systemes PLM product solutions. The Center is staffed by experts who have gained expertise in PLM implementation through the many successful partnerships CSC maintains with leading Aerospace and Defense companies.

By creating the Center, CSC answers an industry need for a method to determine the feasibility of implementing PLM using a manufacturer's existing IT investments, thereby containing the cost issues that erode business value. By duplicating a client's (often heterogeneous) computing environment at the Center, solutions can be demonstrated and problems identified prior to PLM implementation. CSC will also use the Center to establish service offerings around CATIA V4 -> V5 migration, software configuration management, development of design methodologies and best practices, and testing of major software releases.

For more information about the Competency Center and CSC's PLM offerings, please visit our booth at the 2002 COE Spring Conference.

Computer Sciences Corporation, one of the world's leading consulting and information technology (IT) services firms, helps clients in industry and government achieve strategic and operational results through the use of technology. The company's success is based on its culture of working collaboratively with clients to develop innovative technology strategies and solutions that address specific business challenges.

Having guided clients through every major wave of change in information technology since 1959, CSC combines the newest technologies with its capabilities in consulting, systems design and integration, IT and business process outsourcing, applications software, and Web and application hosting to meet the individual needs of global corporations and organizations. With some 68,000 employees in locations worldwide, CSC had revenues of $11.1 billion for the 12 months ended September 28, 2001. It is headquartered in El Segundo, Calif. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.csc.com.

SGI Launches a New Era in Advanced Graphics

Technological breakthroughs in collaborative and scalable visualization technologies deliver new capabilities that the market has never seen before.

Every three years or so, SGI fundamentally changes the world of graphics. That time has come again. On January 29, SGI launched a vision, a road map and a range of new products that will enable universal access to advanced visualization. This vision, Visual Area Networking, allows users to interact with visualization supercomputers using any client device, individually or as a collaborative community. It removes the requirement that either the data or the advanced visualization capability be local to the user. It allows diverse teams of people to visualize and interact with data in ways never previously possible.

For CATIA users, the idea of collaborative visualization might sound like old hat. But this is collaboration with a new twist, the applications and data reside in a central location while only the visual results are distributed to desktop clients. As a result, laptop computers, three-year-old desktop systems and even wireless tablet computers that don't have the CPU, memory, I/O or graphics to run the latest software or manipulate the largest models can now be used to visualize and interact with them. Furthermore, since today's Visual Area Networking technology works in an application transparent manner for both individual users and collaborative teams, organizations can immediately use virtually all of their OpenGL based applications in a collaborative environment.

In addition to the Visual Area Networking vision, SGI introduced four new products that support this vision, deliver breakthrough performance and bring the cost of leading-edge graphics down to price points that make advanced visualization accessible to wider numbers of customers. The new SGI® Onyx® 3000 series with InfinitePerformanceTM graphics achieves breakthrough levels of performance and scalability for visual computing applications, while the price/performance of the new SGI Onyx 300 system with InfiniteReality3TM graphics provides outstanding visual realism value. Silicon Graphics FuelTM arrives as a new product line in the industry-leading SGI suite of MIPS® and IRIX® visualization workstations. And OpenGL VizserverTM 2.0 opens new collaborative and distributed visualization capabilities, helping to usher in a concept known as the Visual Area Network--an important new component of SGI's strategy and vision moving forward.

Breakthrough Scalable Graphics
The new SGI Onyx 3000 series with InfinitePerformance graphics delivers unprecedented geometry performance with 2.3 times more performance for both static review and interactive applications than any other solution now available on the market. This new system takes full advantage of the shared-memory SGI NUMAflexTM architecture of SGI Onyx 3000 series systems to deliver unparalleled interactive graphics performance--up to 300 million triangles per second and 7.7 billion pixels per second. The bottom line is that InfinitePerformance graphics deliver the world's fastest interactive graphics performance with high image quality, flexibility, and affordability.

The NUMAflex architecture enables single shared-memory applications to simultaneously drive up to 16 independent InfinitePerformance graphics pipes that can be configured in a multitude of combinations using SGI scalable graphics compositors. Customers can easily move from one configuration to another to maximize the impact of system performance on an organization.

CATIA users will be able to use the multipipe power of the SGI 3000 series systems with InfinitePerformance graphics to visualize and interact with their most complex models. Furthermore, because of the breakthrough pricing available on these systems, organizations can also deploy high resolution SGI Reality Center, group decision making environments at the department level where critical decisions can now be made in a time critical fashion.

New Levels of Affordable Visual Realism
SGI Onyx 300 with InfiniteReality3 graphics delivers the most advanced visualization capabilities for the many applications in industries that require stunning realism and interactivity. The new combination of the SGI Onyx 300 system with InfiniteReality3 graphics provides an innovative midrange platform that delivers outstanding price/performance value. The SGI Onyx 300 visualization system leverages the acclaimed, compact SGI NUMAflex modular computing technology. It can scale to 32 CPUs and two graphics pipes in a single rack and up to eight graphics pipes in multiple racks. The SGI Onyx 300 system provides lower overall cost of ownership and greater access to the world's most advanced visualization. For CATIA users engaged in photorealistic styling, this means that you can deploy solutions using the highest levels of visual realism at lower costs and to more groups than every before.

First in a New Line of Visualization Workstations with Three Times the Price/Performance
The new Silicon Graphics Fuel desktop workstation leverages the high-bandwidth architecture of the SGI Onyx 3000 series, the MIPS R14000ATM processor, and the performance and quality of SGI VProTM V10 and V12 graphics to deliver new levels of price/performance to the UNIX® workstation market. With its 64-bit architecture, 48-bit RGBA color, and 3.2GB per second memory bandwidth, Silicon Graphics Fuel provides users with a new standard for graphics quality, processing power, and application performance on the desktop. CATIA users will benefit from the increased CPU speed, cache size and memory bandwidth to visualize models faster than ever before.

Powering the Visual Area Network
Finally, the new OpenGL Vizserver 2.0 solution brings remote application access to visualization supercomputers and multiuser collaboration, all using an organization's existing network infrastructure. By delivering the results generated on visual servers located in workgroups or data centers, OpenGL Vizserver 2.0 enables geographically distributed groups to collaborate using off-the-shelf applications and virtually any client device to efficiently solve problems faster and more securely than ever before.

OpenGL Vizserver was initially developed so that centralized visual computing resources could be distributed to individual desktops using an existing network infrastructure. OpenGL Vizserver 2.0 takes the next step by enabling multiple users to collaborate and share those resources through the simultaneous viewing and manipulation of the same application. As such, the new OpenGL Vizserver 2.0 solution is ushering in what we at SGI believe is an important concept--the era of the Visual Area Network.

Individual CATIA users benefit because they can visualize more complex models than would be possible using their desktop workstations, but they still access this power through their desktop. Multiple CPUs and gigabytes per second of I/O mean that models load up to one hundred times faster than networked desktop workstations while analysis is also accelerated. Geographically dispersed teams benefit because they can share control of their applications and work together on complex design and analysis tasks. Organizations benefit because they no longer need to scale each desktop to handle peak model size, but can use a centralized server to provide even more capability where and when it is needed.

Visualization Anywhere
Solving the biggest problems in science and industry requires the best Minds--but increasingly people are both globally dispersed and mobile, while advanced computing resources are fixed. Today, scientists and engineers can log onto a central computer to get data, but they have to transfer the data to the users, who each must have a duplicated copy. To store, process, interact with, and visualize the data, they require very powerful computer systems. SGI's vision of Visual Area Networks introduces the concept of data that is stored and processed in one place--but that can be accessed and manipulated by users, with any client device, individually or in a community.

Just as networks have enabled collaborative computing to become a reality, so Visual Area Networks extend the paradigm by bringing visual computing resources into the mix. At SGI we believe that Visual Area Networking opens new application possibilities that promise to change the way people work and organizations operate. We believe our advanced visual computing products and technologies place us in the vanguard of this evolution.

As originally posted on sgi.com.