CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
30 September 2008
Product News
Spatial Introduces Industry First Thread-Safe 3D Modeling Component
Spatial Corp. announced immediate availability of Thread-Safe ACIS Modeler, the first commercially available thread-safe 3D geometric modeling component. Thread-safe ACIS allows applications to employ concurrent threads of execution within ACIS. For compute-intensive operations, the result is near linear performance scaling on multi-core systems. Computer-aided design (CAD), engineering (CAE) and manufacturing (CAM) applications can realize significant performance gains when faceting, sectioning, and performing most ACIS modeling operations which work on multiple independent parts. In contrast to multi-threaded components that utilize ‘fine grain parallelism,’ Thread-Safe ACIS offers application developers the prospect to achieve performance gains within their own application and under their own control.
“The future of software programming is in enabling applications to take full advantage of multi-core hardware platforms. Thread-Safe ACIS helps with the development of multi-threaded applications which can lead to significant performance advantages,” stated James Reinders, Director of Marketing and Sales for Intel's Software Development Products. “Any software developers not already developing multi-threaded applications should be engaged in learning how best to code their software applications for today’s multi-core, and tomorrow’s many core processors.”
At the core of Thread-Safe ACIS is the 3D ACIS Modeler, the geometry component for thousands of applications world-wide and on over 1.5 million end-user seats. ACIS features an open, object-oriented C++ architecture that enables robust, 3D modeling capabilities for applications with simple to complex modeling needs. Thread-Safe ACIS enables developers to take advantage of multi-core architectures and provides the best approach to address their biggest application performance challenges.
Thread-Safe ACIS was designed in response to two major industry trends: designers modeling larger and more complex assemblies requiring higher application performance, and the rise of multi-core hardware platforms, with predictions of 128-core processors in five years. Because Thread-Safe ACIS allows applications to utilize ‘coarse-grain parallelism,’ scalability is ensured today and into the future. Examples of compute-intensive tasks that can benefit from implementing Thread-Safe ACIS include multi-body feature regeneration, faceting, and sectioning/slicing. Using an Intel X5460-based 8-core workstation these modeling operations have shown near linear scaling.
“As a 3D software component provider, we have a responsibility to anticipate the future technology needs of our development partners because tomorrow’s end-user applications are being developed today. It is clear that the next wave of application performance gains is best achievable by taking advantage of multi-core processors. These platforms are already pervasive in today’s end-user environments,” commented John Alpine, Spatial VP of Research and Development. “Our customers understand that some development effort is necessary to achieve performance gains. Thread-Safe ACIS Modeler offers them a way to achieve significant gains from their development efforts.”
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