3D Modeling

[shailesh]

Hi,

I would like to know whether our customers have started using dual-core systems.  And how soon they will expect ACIS, InterOp to be truly multi-threaded ? This issue has an enormous impact on us !

[oklaar]

Hi,
for us, multi-threading is a big topic. We are developing a client-server application, where multiple clients want to concurrently access ACIS.
We are currently encapsulating all calls to the ACIS API in a singleton which queues all calls to the API and processes them subsequently.
When is multi-threading support scheduled?
regards,
oliver

[prwolfe]

We regularly use multi-core systems and a great deal of advantage could be gained from threaded apps.  For us the real issue is not the InterOp stuff, but the core acis library.  This is a much more difficult problem as I am sure everyone realizes so I don't really expect any gains on this in the near future.  The best work-around we have found is using Linux systems for their native speed advantage, and using MPI-style process-level parallization instead of thread-level.

Paul

[Jeff]

Hi Oliver

Can multiple clients work on the same model concurently?

Jeff

[Tim]

>>And how soon they will expect ACIS, InterOp to be truly multi-threaded ?

How about partially threaded as a first step? For example, one area that slows the user experience wrt dynamic modeling is facetting of data. What about Spatial internally threading calls such as api_facet_entity by faces?

Tim

[Tiberius]

Our company writes scientific simulation software. Our calculation engines have taken advantage of multiple processors for at least ten years. In the last five years, we have strived to include more and more threading throughout our entire application. The new multi-core + multi-processor machines are helping to push the speed of our application tremendously. Personally, I would say you are at least five years late in getting started. I think that threading of InterOp is the most critical issue for us. Many of our customers use third-party CAD programs to generate their files and then import them into our software. This process has become a major bottleneck, and it wil become more so with each release of our software.

[Tiberius]

I also agree with Tim. Faceting would be our next area of concern. My personal priority list:
1) InterOp (STEP import in particular)
2) Faceting
3) File saving/loading

I do not know how much file saving/loading can really be sped up through threading, but it is the next area where our customers spend their time waiting. Of course, threaded faceting would also help in that area since faceting occurs immediately after file loading for us.

[oklaar]

Hi Jeff,
sorry that I reply only now, but I didn't check for follow-ups on my message ;-).
Clients can work on the same model concurrently and it works fine. But we haven't yet tested to modify entities, we only query models (getting  Brep-structures,  attributes etc.) and do tessellation. ACIS and IOP are the core of our CAD-Server which is queried by clients. The whole thing is based on CORBA (ACIS/IOP -> Wrapper -> CORBA-Server -> CORBA-Clients).
The only issue we face right now is freeing memory after all clients have finished working on a model ("close" the model).

Oliver