CAD Insider

Why Are the Smartest Guys Flying Fat Boy Scouts?

SAN JOSE, CA, Oct 1, 2009 - Does going to a really popular restaurant make you expect a good meal? But the waiter ignores you, the menu's in a different language and most of the entries are meat -- you've just turned vegetarian. All the other diners are having a great time, eating it up, and getting lots of attention. 

So it seemed at the sold out, standing room only GPU Technology Conference. I was curious how the GPU power very much in evidence was going to help CAD, CAM and CAE users. But I was feeling like the bastard child.

Stanford professor Pat Hanrahan tells us the hottest trends in visual computing are in movies and games. Are the smartest guys in the room using their brains to make sure the fat boy scout floats a house into the sky with a bunch of balloons? I'm hearing that was the funniest animated movie ever, but ---damn, shouldn't they be doing something important. I'm about to deliver yet another righteous rant about how really important design and engineering is in the scheme of things ...until it occurs to me that back at the office we are currently helping an inventor model a contraption that keeps piss from splashing on the walls of the bathroom. 

Or wait...maybe I can be righteously indignant after all. Piss on walls must be a real world problem -- unlike the house on  balloons. There must be thousands of maids cursing errant pissers in hotels. Or marraiges breaking up because the male of the house considers forceful urination his terrritory and the cleanup, someone else's.

The light bulb goes on: Instead of modeling water splashing trivially in a invisible cube, which is nothing but an excercise for the graphically gifted, why not model Pissing in Toilets. A splash resistant toilet is a worthy goal and could occupy the brighter minds among us. At least it would keep them out of the animation studios and game labs.

GPU Technology Conference - But Seriously, Folks

SAN JOSE, CA, Sep 30, 2009 - Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, kicks off the sold-out GPU Technology Conference by telling to ignore him in the flesh but to focus instead on the 3D image of himself on the big screen. That should be no problem for the ubergeeks in the audience, who judging by the lush graphics clearly prefer fantasy to reality.

We are treated to an overly buxom fairy and a red fire truck that we are told is a zillion polygons.

NVIDIA's fairy, Dawn, introduced a few years ago as a technology preview, never seems to get old.

"A billion dollars later, i get some eye candy," jokes Jen-Hsun.

Ah, a self-deprecating CEO-- much appreciated over some stuffed shirt business type.

We also get CG images of bodies being flung against and through a wall. "I see so much joy that could be derived from this," says Jen-Hsun. Green water splashes around in an invisible box, drawing oohs and ahs from an audience that must appreciate the underlying mathematics. It doesn't look quite right to me -- the surface appears pockmarked, I think because it is based on thousands of balls -- a lot until you consider real life water is based on trillions of molecules. I realize I'm expecting too much...

It's physics-based, we are told, as if that is going to shut me up.

Lest NVIDIA be dismissed for being frivolous, Jen_Hsun steers our attention to more serious matters. What could be more serious than cancer? David Robinson, CEO of  TechniScan explains how NVIDIA's graphic speed has been instrumental in analyzing data from breast cancer scans. "Any cancer can be cured -- if it is detected early enough."

Think Inside the BOXX

It may have been the case that CAD users could brag about being the top dogs, sitting in front of expensive workstations. When I entered the industry (back in the 1980's), a CAD workstation could set you back $25,000 easy and some of the more expensive ones were going for $50,000. But after years of being equalized by Windows, most of us are reduced to running on plain beige boxes. Once we were stars, now we reduced to riding commodity boxes. All that separates our PCs from the admin's PC is a Gig or two of RAM, maybe a bigger hard drive. What is that to brag about?

BOXX is one company that seeks to reverse that trend, as if to say to the CAD user "rise up and get the workstation you deserve!' but offering those workstations at far below the prices mentioned above. They were at SIGGRPAPH touting their workstations for graphics and animation, but they were quite keen to talk to me about the CAD market. According to BOXX, the same advantage their high end hardware gives to the SIGGRPAPH crowd would also work wonders for high end CAD users. What's a high end CAD user? Say a Pro/E userr with a 20,000 part assembly. Or a SolidWorks user who routinely needs photorealistc rendering.

I forgot to ask why a company that is trying to replace the commodity PCs disdainfully referred to as boxes would take on BOXX as its name.