Florence Hu-Aubigny: Dassault Systemes and Democratizing 3D (Channel 9)

In this episode of Inside Out we chat with Dassault Systemes' Vice President and Director of Architecture Florence Hu-Aubigny. Dassault Systemes is a global leader in PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) Solutions utilizing 3D representation with approximately 6700 employees in 27 countries.

The Boeing 787 was completely designed in a virtual 3D PLM environment using Dassault's technology, which is capable of transforming very large complex data sets into extremely accurate and interactive 3D simulations.

One of Dassault's missions is to democratize 3D visualaztion. This means, they have a platform that doesn't require users to be rocket scientists to develop accurate 3D representations of data to be used for a number of purposes.

Florence is an engineer. Even as VP she still writes code and helps out on the hardest of bugs. Very cool!

Check out http://3ds.com for more information.

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trackerball

Mar 15, 2007 at 3:53 AM

Very interesting video. Florence mentioned about Boeing using Dassault's CATIA for building the latest 787 aircraft. Building the 787 is a massive collaborative effort for Boeing- aircraft design engineeers work on designing aircraft parts from multiple geographical locations like US, Japan, Russia and Italy (to name a few). My company, Citrix, worked closely with Boeing to provide a "vitrual team workspace" to run CATIA software deployed on Citrix Presentaion Servers enhanced with 3D graphics acceleration technologies. The project was codenamed "Pictor" in Citrix. I am very proud to have been part of that project here.
ckozlowski

Mar 15, 2007 at 8:49 AM

Neat stuff!

Actually, I'm wondering if your Citrix solution helped avoid some of the problems Airbus incured when using this software. According to an article I read a while back, the French and German design teams working on the A380 were using different versions of the CATIA software, which lead to inconsistancies in the designs and manufacturing. This lead to some very public delays.

I'm suspecting that by having the Boeing design teams run the software from Presnetation Servers, it's much easier to perform version control and ensure everyone is on the same baseline, as opposed to having to patch workstations and check version numbers.

Of course, having worked with Citrix myself, you do need a good backend and robust network connections to drive those applications with sufficient performance. I'd be interested to hear how that was accomplished.

The article is here if you're interested. Good video C9!

http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2089756,00.asp
trackerball

Mar 15, 2007 at 11:59 AM

Traditionally the Citrix ICA protocol is well-known for its non-chattiness. But you are right, the WAN environment on which the entire system was deployed posed quite a few challenges related to latency.

Since latency is something that one cannot avoid, we optmized performance in other ways such as using standard but efficient compression techniques in rendering frames. Plus using hardware graphics acceleration helps produce and subsequently pump more frames out to the client workstation than traditional software rendering.

Using a Citrix solution to deploy such an application not only solves the problems related to versioning that you describe, but also helps secure IP (Intellectual Property) - the part designs can be kept on the central server and do not have to be copied over to each client workstation. Quite a few companies (not sure about Boeing) are required to comply to this according to US Law.
Flyboy

Nov 05, 2008 at 7:52 AM

Hi trackerball,

Very interested in this subject. We have Catia and Citrix and we want to give access to external worker to Catia in our datawarehouse from WAN connexion. I have read a lot about Citrix virtual design studio (formely pictor project) but if you can tell me more about this don't hesitate I have applied for project appollo either but don't have answer yet.

We are also in aeronautical business and have heard about that boeing is using such technology but never had the chance to see it in live.

So now we are testing HP RGS solution which is doing quite good results but would prefer to stay in a citrix solution. The project has to be running for 1 february 2009 so don't have many times in front

thanks for any comments