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ANSYS Conference to Inspire Engineering

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Engineering Simulation Solutions Leader Brings Together Product Innovators this August
ANSYS, Inc. (NASDAQ: ANSS), a global innovator of simulation software and technologies designed to optimize product development processes, today announced its hallmark event, the 2008 International ANSYS Conference. A must-attend event for executives, managers and technical staff in a wide range of industries, the conference is scheduled for August 26 to 28 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

This is the 14th conference that ANSYS has staged since its inaugural event in 1983. During the last two decades, as simulation has become a critical element of the product development process, the content, breadth of technology and attendance of the International ANSYS Conference has grown as well. Companies from around the world, in a wide range of industries, are planning to attend the 2008 event. More than 800 people attended the last conference, held in 2006. ANSYS also will be hosting an analyst day in conjunction with the conference on August 26 for financial and industry analysts.

The International ANSYS Conference brings together engineers, analysts and management from all disciplines of simulation to learn about the future of engineering design simulation and analysis. Themed “Inspiring Engineering,” this year’s conference will showcase how global, innovative companies use engineering simulation to inspire their engineering designs, resulting in improved products and processes. The conference will demonstrate how the ANSYS vision and its powerful technologies meet the ever-changing needs of users who demand integrated, automated, scalable and multidisciplinary tools. In addition, participants will have the opportunity to see and hear how future capabilities from ANSYS will impact the industry, to try out the hands-on preview, and to exchange ideas with ANSYS team members, industry experts and colleagues from companies throughout the world.

“We believe simulation leads to inspired engineering. It powers the product innovation engine,” said Jim Cashman, president and CEO of ANSYS, Inc. “We see evidence of this every day as we engage with our customers around the world. Companies successful at leveraging simulation throughout the product development process have a distinct advantage in an increasingly competitive global environment. The conference is a great opportunity for all of us to learn about the unique ways customers are innovating through Simulation Driven Product Development™.”

The 2008 International ANSYS Conference will feature dynamic keynote presentations, technical sessions, management sessions, ANSYS Solves topics (which provide an inside look at the latest technologies from ANSYS and how this technology can be applied to help ensure success), and vendor exhibitions.

Keynote conference speakers will discuss the use of simulation as a vehicle for inspired engineering design:

  • James E. Cashman III, President and Chief Executive Officer, ANSYS, Inc.: perspectives on the ANSYS vision for Simulation Driven Product Development
  • Dipankar Choudhury, Vice President, Corporate Product Strategy and Planning, ANSYS, Inc.: product plans and roadmap
  • Willem Toet, Head of Aerodynamics, BMW Sauber F1: strategic utilization of CFD for competitive advantage in automotive racing
  • Jerry Young, Director, Materials and Structures Technology, Boeing – Phantom Works: challenges for advanced simulation in aerospace product development

Technical sessions will detail how product development professionals in specific industries and application areas have deployed simulation technology in their design process: academic, aerospace and defense, biomedical, chemicals, civil engineering, consumer products, electronics, knowledge management, large-scale analysis, materials processing, multiphysics simulation, nuclear power, oil and gas, optimization and Design for Six Sigma, power generation, semiconductors, sustainable and green technologies, and turbomachinery.

To highlight managerial concerns, a management roundtable will host a panel discussion at which innovative, successful and visionary ANSYS customers share how they have applied simulation technology to achieve significant success within their global organizations. This panel discussion, themed “Inspiring Engineering with Simulation,” is a chance for attendees to hear from — and pose questions to — a diverse group of managers from leading global organizations, including Becton, Dickinson and Company; The Dow Chemical Company; Goodrich Corporation; Texas Instruments Incorporated; and Whirlpool Corporation.

A second roundtable discussion featuring thought leaders in high-performance computing (HPC) will examine how significant advances in HPC create an opportunity for ANSYS customers to improve their overall ROI concerning the use of simulation. Panelists will include representatives from ANSYS, Hewlett-Packard Company, Microsoft Corporation and Silicon Graphics, Inc.

The World of Inspiration Expo will provide a great opportunity to learn, get inspired and network with peers as ANSYS and its most valued partners provide hands-on demos, literature and displays of their innovative products. The hands-on area will give attendees the opportunity to work with the full range of software offerings from ANSYS, as well as preview the upcoming ANSYS capabilities. In addition, experts in disciplines from nonlinear, explicit, and fluid structure interaction to full multiphysics, meshing and electronics will be available to consult informally on problem solving and best practices. Formal presentations will be staged in the area as well, providing another opportunity to learn about the latest technology from ANSYS.

Post-conference training, to be held August 28 and 29 at the Westin Convention Center Pittsburgh, will offer insight into products from ANSYS for a variety of advanced analyses. Participants will receive hands-on instruction on topics ranging from combustion modeling to multiphysics.

Sponsors of the 2008 International ANSYS Conference include Intel and SGI (platinum level) as well as Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Moldflow, AMD, CEI, Dell and nCode.

Company: ANSYS, Inc. ANSYS, Inc.
Web Site: www.ansys.com
Location: Pittsburgh, PA 15238
Description: ANSYS, Inc., founded in 1970, develops and globally markets engineering simulation software and technologies widely used by engineers and designers across a broad spectrum of industries. The Company focuses on the development of open and flexible solutions that enable users to analyze designs directly on the desktop, providing a common platform for fast, efficient and cost- conscious product development, from design concept to final-stage testing and validation. Read more.
 
Company: Microsoft Microsoft
Web Site: www.microsoft.com
Location: Pittsburgh, PA 15212
Description: Microsoft Corporation’s long-held vision of a computer on every desk and in every home continues to be at the core of everything the Company does. Microsoft is committed to the belief that software is the tool that empowers people both at work and at home. Read more.

Jump-Starting Collaboration with Social Search

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Excerpt from Vivisimo whitepaper:
Over the past several years, industry pundits and vendors have predicted that collaboration tools such as social tagging, social networking, wikis and other Web 2.0 phenomena will become mainstream within the enterprise. In fact, Gartner reported that by the end of 2007, thirty percent of all large corporations
had Web 2.0 applications enabled within their organizations. But as the adoption of Web 2.0 functionality hits the enterprise, a question still remains—how can enterprises effectively integrate these web-based tools into their corporate infrastructure in a way that maximizes employee collaboration?

The answer is through search. Almost all data created by enterprise applications can be crawled by a search engine and accessed via a search box. Many organizations connect all of their applications through a single search screen today. Over the past several years, enterprise search has opened the doors to all content stored throughout the enterprise. The next step is to provide end users with tools to make sense of this overwhelming amount of information and to easily share knowledge with colleagues and business partners. These collaboration tools, which will turn the quest for collaboration into a reality, are now available through new enterprise search capabilities—social search.

By taking the best ideas from Web 2.0 based concepts, such as social tagging, social bookmarking and networking, and marrying them with the power of business search, social search gives enterprises the ability to tap into and make use of the vast amount of human knowledge within their own organizations. As the examples in this paper show, social search provides the means to go beyond just finding information to actually freeing it from the confines of applications, allowing organizations to increase collaboration and accelerate innovation—all while gaining valuable insight into the collective intelligence of the organization.

Download the complete Jump-Starting Collaboration with Social Search Whitepaper.

Visit Vivisimo’s Search Done Right™ blog.

Company: Vivisimo, Inc. Vivisimo, Inc.
Web Site: www.vivisimo.com
Location: Pittsburgh, PA 15217
Description: Vivisimo, Inc., provides intelligent software that helps enterprises to organize information from anywhere, any time, in any language. Its breakthrough clustering and meta-search products retrieve textual information from one or multiple sources and automatically organize the combined results on-the-fly into meaningful folders. Read more.

TUG Delivers Cheer…and More…to Young Patients

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Aethon Inc. recently announced general availability of its train-themed “JR” autonomous mobile robot to children’s hospitals across the country and that Aethon will make a donation to the Make-A-Wish Foundation for each JR TUG that is deployed. The JR TUG is currently delivering equipment to children at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin and medication to children in North Carolina at Carolinas Healthcare Systems in addition to the original implementation at UCSF.

Modeled after the title character in the children’s book “The Little Engine that Could,” JR was originally developed to help grant a wish for Jericho Rajninger, a seven-year old leukemia patient from Larkspur, California, and was donated to UCSF Children’s Hospital through the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

As part of his chemotherapy treatment Jericho had to take more than 4,000 pills. He realized that the prospect of all that medicine could be frightening for other children. Jericho believed that having the medications delivered by a robot modeled after a train might make the prospect of all those pills more pleasant.

“We were honored to make Jericho’s wish to help other sick children a reality,” said Aldo Zini, CEO of Aethon. “We are extremely pleased that the JR robots are being deployed in other children’s hospitals and hope that they will in some sense help sick children and their parents nationwide cope with a difficult experience.”

JR is based on Aethon’s TUG, a mobile autonomous robot that transports medical equipment and supplies. JR has drawers in its “caboose” from which medications can be drawn by nurses. The robot also features a conductor who speaks to children with the voice of legendary voice over actor Don LaFontaine. “Look out, here I come,” “Thanks, from the bottom of my caboose,” “Pardon my caboose, I’m turning around,” “Engines revved and ready to go,” and “Choo choo, gotta run” are among the phrases JR speaks.

“Our JR TUG makes the delivery of equipment and supplies more efficient while offering some cheer to our young patients,” said Tom Lausten, director of Pharmacy Services at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin. “In addition, staff is able to focus on patient care without having to worry about the logistics of delivery.”

Company: Aethon Aethon
Web Site: www.aethon.com
Location: Pittsburgh, PA 15205
Description: Aethon is the leader in the business of low-cost, pilot-less hauling of material indoors. Aethon has developed a cost-saving hospital automation product called the TUG®, which automates and tracks the indoor transport of goods to reduce labor costs and improve supply chain efficiency. Read more.

MAYAsign :: New Innovation from an Old Idea

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The MAYAsign (side note: MAYA is always capitalized as it is an acronym for Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) is an experiment in pervasive computing. It not only represents their brand and mission (the aforementioned acronym) but also their connection to the community. For over 18 years they’ve been on the Southside, slowly growing and prospering as the world has gotten more and more complex. Their extended community of thinkers (MAYA and their offspring) now numbers over 150 strong on the Southside. But many people don’t even realize they’re in Pittsburgh, let alone a long standing member of the community. For MAYA, it seemed like time to change that misperception and have a little fun along the way. Many MAYA employees remembered fondly growing up with the Gulf Tower beaming down a colored light based on the weather, visible from just about any neighborhood in Pittsburgh. They thought they’d take this simple idea of “ambient” information that you can understand at a glance and take it one step further. Could they make our sign a window into any number of bits of information gathered from sensors or off of the web?

Well, they’re just starting the experiment but they’ve already got a few things working and more to come in the coming weeks and months ahead.

So how does it work?
The background of the sign (only visible at night because they’d like to conserve energy) is actually comprised of a low resolution grid of 3 color LEDs that are addressable via a built in web server. Each letter is also backlit with addressable LEDs, and the whole sign has a wireless hotspot and Web page to control the action.

Currently its only visible to our the MAYA community of designers as they run it through its paces (they want to create a set of possible features that will be inspire people about pervasive computing but that will also be appropriate for the neighborhood… i.e. no blinking vegas style over the top stuff). Soon it will be visible to one and all if you’re standing anywhere near the corner of Carson and 27th streets (or really anywhere that you have access to the Web but its more fun if you can see what you’re doing).

So what can it do so far?
MAYA designers can send it pictures via e-mail with commands in the body of the e-mail like “crop,” and “scroll left slowly” and within a few seconds the background will display the picture. This is a fun way to use a camera phone to set patterns and colors (they wandered through Urban Outfitters the other day and snapped abstract patterns and posted them to the sign instantly for example). This is a nice way to demonstrate what the world will be like in the future if we have anything to say about it. Currently setting colors in physical environments “I’d like to change my walls to red today…” isn’t even possible unless you’re hobbyist but they think you will be able to in the future. It would be a pretty sad world if you had to use some sort of complicated program to access this sort of power. Instead they look for clever ways to use technology to let you do things that seem like magic. In this example, just point and shoot your camera phone and think of it as a paint brush and the world as your palette.

Of course MAYA has a bunch of computer scientists around there so they can also send e-mails that are more geeky like “RGB 0 0 0″ which would turn the background all black, or “RGB 255 0 0″ which would turn it all red (RGB stands for the standard Red Green Blue pixels used to define pictures on a computer screen). Aside from colors, patterns and imagery.

They’ve also been experimenting with visualizations, many of which will be selectable from a drop down menu from the Web site by anyone with a smart phone or laptop.

Sample visualizations will include:

  • Weather: a 24 hour look into the future gathered from an RSS feed from local weather websites (is snow coming? is the pollen count high?, etc.)
  • Power Usage: they’ve been playing with ways to show how much energy is being used in their office, their building, their block, and their town at any given moment (they may need some help with this one so its under their wishlist right now)
  • Activity at MAYA: have they had a bunch of people in the offices today, do they expect a bunch tomorrow?, how much bandwidth are they using?, how many linear feet of whiteboard ink have they made today coming up with new ideas for their customers?, etc.)
  • Sound: There is always something going on at the Southside Works in the evenings and on the weekends. In August American Eagle is having a music festival, their sign will show a graphic representation of the music to go along with the performances.

They’re also writing some multi-user games to play on the sign. Imagine if you and a bunch of friends could use your iphones as an aggregated set of “paddles” in a distributed game of pong that requires teamwork and coordination to play.

How do I try it out?
By the end of August the public version of the MAYAsign Web site and hotspot will be visible. Stop by some evening and take it for a spin. If you’ve got ideas for fun things to visualize drop they a line, they’d love to hear suggestions.

This just MAYA’s first visible foray into thinking about what happens when the world shifts from information being “in” computers to us being “in” the information.

Company: MAYA Design MAYA Design
Web Site: www.maya.com
Location: Pittsburgh, PA 15203
Description: MAYA is a design consultancy and technology research lab. They tame complexity by transforming complex technology into easy-to-use products. Read more.

Emerson Modernizing Four Units at India’s Tanda Thermal Power Station

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Emerson has already completed replacement of outdated manual controls for Unit 3 BMS, FSSS in record time as part of NTPC’s larger initiative to improve system reliability and availability

Emerson Process Management announced today it has been selected by NTPC Ltd. to modernize obsolete controls at the Tanda Thermal Power Station, a 4×110 MW plant located in Uttar Pradesh, India. NTPC is the largest power utility in India and the sixth-largest thermal power generator in the world.

Emerson is installing its Ovation® expert control system at all four units of the coal-fired power plant as part of a comprehensive renovation and maintenance project. A noteworthy challenge for the control system aspect of the project was the timeframe required for Unit 3 – the first unit slated for modernization.

Emerson received the contract for Unit 3 after the previous vendor was unable to meet the original schedule. The control system installation and unit commissioning needed to take place during a 90-day scheduled outage, which began the last week of March 2008. A mere three months after contract award, Emerson, which has a proven track record meeting aggressive deadlines, was able to complete the project during a specified 70-day window within the outage.

At all four Tanda units, the Ovation system will monitor and control the burner management system (BMS) and furnace safeguard supervisory system (FSSS). The Ovation system, designed to meet the specific challenges of the power generation industry, will also interface to existing BHEL boiler and turbine controls. In all, the Ovation system will manage 10,000 I/O points (2,500 points per unit). The contract also calls for Emerson to supply a total of 40 Ovation redundant controllers (10 per unit) and 36 workstations (nine per unit).

Emerson’s local India Engineering Center is designing, engineering and supervising the project.

“We know that customers turn to Emerson not only for our industry-leading Ovation control technology, but also for top-notch project execution,” said Bob Yeager, president of the Power & Water Solutions division of Emerson. “Our ability to meet NTPC’s challenging deadline is rewarding, as it demonstrates how Emerson’s dedicated employees will do whatever it takes to succeed at our number-one objective: ensuring customer satisfaction.”

Company: Emerson Process Management ALGOR, Inc.
Web Site: www.emersonprocess.com
Location: Pittsburgh, PA 15238
Description: Power & Water Solutions, based in Pittsburgh, engineers and supports process control technology to improve the performance and efficiency of power plants, wastewater treatment facilities and water treatment facilities. Read more.