Responding at the speed of design: ANSYS' latest software upgrade is more evolutionary than mathematical - Software Technology

Automotive Industries, Jan, 2004 by Rich Wilson

With the general speed enhancements to the system, especially with the meshing, tuning up the mathematical dexterity of the programs was not overlooked.

"We spend a lot of development resources in improving the performance of our solving capabilities. The reason I say performance is because performance is a combination of actual CPU time along with actually having the necessary computer resources to do it. In 8.0 we've come up with two new distributive solvers and performance improvements to all our existing solvers. The net effect has been very positive. We've been seeing improvements in the range of 30-50 percent time reduction but have received reports from customers that in some cases the time has been reduced by more than that."

Linear Equations are also heavily used for ANSYS CAE purposes. Linear equations, in essence, can answer questions that have to do with durability, stiffness and so on, which are clearly concerns for customers in the automotive sphere.

"Force is equal to stiffness times direction, and that governs a host of engineering problems that relate to durability, stiffness which in turn goes to overall ride of the car. All the things we would consider that influence what makes quality in a car," Wheeler explained.

ANSYS applies what they refer to as an 'agile method' of developing their software. One operation within this method is the use of proxy customers. Wheeler details some of the process:

"The product teams drive development. Within each product team will be from 8 to 10 projects, new features, each one of those new features has we what call a proxy customer. And that is somebody out in industry who is going to give us constant feedback. We typically send out software to those guys--just to spend 10 minutes to send us some feedback every two weeks. This process gives us very frequent interaction with those customers."

In the end, all the physics and math boil down to a much simpler formula. Constant customer input helps provide an exponentially clearer picture of what kind of software designers need. The entire process and product was best described when Wheeler said, "If I want to respond at the speed of design then I've got to provide my information back to the design engineer in hours, not days or weeks."

While complex--it's just that simple.