Is CEI collapsing?

Apparently the rumor mill a few months ago was saying that the developers at CEI who were working on Volume Rendering were leaving the company.

I have no explanation for this rumor, perhaps the rumormongers will have to chime in. My guess is that when you are having problems competing with people you start to spread rumors about them. We didn't know about this rumor until we started talking about our Volume Rendering progress and approaching release of EnSight 9.1. I think that our progress in Volume Rendering had started to rattle some people's cages.

I guess to add fuel to my rebuttal, we'd like to welcome our newest employee, Dave Bremer.

Dave is joining the Development team. He comes to us from Lawrence Livermore National Labs. Before that he was educated at Brown University with a Master's of Computer Science, and a Bachelor's of Computer Science and Math at Concordia University-River Forest.

And for those keeping track, no government stimulus money was used to induce CEI to hire another employee to North Carolina.

Do you like to vote on things? HPCwire

HPCwire issues their "Reader's Choice Awards Survey". The awards are given out at SuperComputing. CEI was certainly proud to receive an award in the past for EnSight Gold one year and EnSight Lite another year.

If you'd like to vote EnSight CFD, the product introduction we made this year, that'd be great. We recommend you put it in the category of "Best use of HPC application in manufacturing" since CFD and EnSight are usually in this category, from among the choices (no sense in your vote getting 'wasted' in the wrong category).

Best of HPC Contest Survey

By the way, at SuperComputing we are having a Birds of a Feather meeting (BOF) (public welcome) on Tuesday night and Customer dinner (by invitation) on Wednesday evening. Email Kevin Colburn if you'd like an invitation to the customer dinner. kevin at ensight.com

CEI Opening International Office in Munich

CEI Opens International Office in Munich to Better Serve the Central, Northern, and Eastern European Market

APEX, N.C., October 15, 2009 — Raimund Schweiger, a mechanical engineer and specialist in computer-aided engineering (CAE), computer-aided design (CAD), and product lifecycle management (PLM) with more than three decades of experience, has joined CEI to head the company’s first international office in Munich, Germany. Raimund will be the branch manager responsible for new and existing accounts throughout Germany, Austria, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Scandinavia, Finland Denmark, and Eastern Europe. Best-known for its industry-leading suite of EnSight software, CEI offers is a developer of simulation software and offers a range of applications for the scientific and engineering community, including tools for data visualization and plotting, communicating 3D results, and creating animations.

Schweiger, a graduate of Technical University Munich in mechanical engineering, comes to CEI from TechnoStar Europe GmbH, where he served as the managing director. He also served as a Managing Director and Co-founder of CAEvolution GmbH, Director of European Marketing at MSC Software GmbH, Manager of MSC Software France, and a Numerical Analyst at BMW AG. Schweiger has an extensive knowledge of virtual product engineering (CAE, FEA) in European aerospace, automotive, and defense industries.

“Schweiger’s extensive knowledge of the European market as well as his engineering background in aerospace, automotive and defense made him the best candidate for this position. We already have numerous EnSight users in central, northern, and eastern Europe, but we are exited to grow our customer base through the direct face-to-face contact Raimund will provide,” says vice president of sales & marketing, Darin McKinnis.

CEI plans to offer its entire suite of EnSight products in the region. The Munich office has great potential, according to McKinnis. This new office will allow CEI to further relationships with existing clients in northern Europe, such as Airbus, Volkswagen, Daimler, Audi, BMW Sauber, Robert Bosch, and Volvo.

The office location is planned to be:

CEI GmbH
gate Garchinger Technologie- und Gründerzentrum GmbH
Lichtenbergstraße 8
85748 Garching bei München
Raimund Schweiger
Branch Manager
raimund.schweiger@ensight.com
Phone +49-89- 37 48 91 44
Mobile +49-172- 8646988
Website: http://www.ensight.com/munich-office.html

CEI GmbH of Munich will begin accepting orders for EnSight software and customer support as of January 2010, and is currently providing quotes for 2010 services and software.

There is a current job position open, in Garching bei Munchen, for a technical support person.

Isn't it cool that CEI now has an office in Detroit, Houston, Munich, and by early next year Shanghai? Plus distributor partners in Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Sydney, and others.

Engineous Isight, CEI EnSight, MSC.Patran and Insight confusion

Blogging is a great way to get some information out there that just can't seem to get any traction. At least with blogging you know the information is on the internet and might just possibly take on a life of its own.

Here's a tidbit that has dogged me for several years. People at tradeshows and conferences constantly confuse our product with some similarly named products in the industry. Its bad enough there are other EnSight things like oil companies and other CEI companies like the local one that services photocopiers and printers. I'm talking about products which are also in the MCAE industry and have some relation to post-processing of results. So here's a run-down, and I'll admit right now that I'll probably have to edit this post in the future as my audience points out ones I missed.

CEI EnSight - our friend the general purpose post-processor of CFD, FEA, crash, combustion, electromagnetics, FSI, and multi-physics data. Famous for handling large data and its amazing interactivity with large data.

Engineous iSight - the company Engineous is located nearby to us in Cary, NC and was bought last year by Dassault Systemes so they are part of the Simulia Group. This Simulia Group also contains the Abaqus FEA product. EnSight reads Abaqus results, from their .fil and .odb files. That's why we go to Simulia conferences and user group meetings to show off EnSight. iSight is a product which enables you to run many, many runs of your solver, for example Abaqus and get some optimization by comparing the runs. iSight and EnSight are not competitors. In Japan people have hooked together iSight and EnSight, a story I hope to tell you about in another posting.

MSC.Patran and InSight. InSight is a visualization module which was bolted onto MSC.Patran for many years. I believe Patran no longer includes this module. However since Insight was supposed to make Patran better for post-processing many people are confused about Insight and EnSight. EnSight can read data from several MSC products including Dytran (MSC.Dytran), Marc (MSC.Marc), Nastran (MSC.Nastran or MD Nastran), and ADAMS (MSC.ADAMS) and combinations of these like Dytran coupled with Adams. EnSight is the only tool able to visualize such solver combinations, though I suspect MSC would like to make SimXpert do that some day. Further confusing the issue is that for awhile SimXpert was embedding some technology from CEI, some of our Apex technology. Some people at MSC became misinformed and passed along misinformed information that "EnSight was embedded in SimXpert". This was simply not the case. I think the rumor had legs because people wanted to have EnSight's capabilities available to them in SimXpert. Those customers just need to just buy EnSight.

Okay I hope that sorted it out for somebody out there.

EnSight 9.0.3c faster, better, and reads more data

We are pleased to announce the release of EnSight 9.0.3c.

This version of EnSight includes:
- improved readers for Fluent, Star-CD .ccm, LS-Dyna, Tecplot, Nastran, CTH, and Marc files.
- new readers for Airpak and Icepak from ANSYS
- faster rendering of particles
- many bug fixes
This is not a feature release (the previous release in June was 9.0.3b).

The next major release is expected to be EnSight 9.1 and is not expected until January, 2010.

EnSight 9.1 will feature volume rendering. See an example from EnSight below. If people request it I will post the movie from which this image was taken to show the dynamic nature of our Volume Rendering.

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EnSight 9.0.3c much faster for particles on Windows

I've been pushing to make EnSight better for DEM models like those from DEM-Solution's EDEM code. For one reason because EnSight is already so good at post-processing EDEM data.

Another reason is that many people are coupling EDEM with CFD codes like Fluent and FEA codes like Adams, Dytran, Marc, and ANSYS to perform multiphysics analysis. EnSight can load data from EDEM and the same time the data from these other programs, as well as from CAD programs like Catia, Unigraphics, Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks and others. For example see this compilation video on Youtube.

One problem though was with particle rendering. It was slow on Windows. Fortunately our EnSight development team came up with a fix for this and put it into 9.0.3(c).

EnSight 9.0.3(c) with the faster particle rendering in Windows is now released. You can download it from our website. This is many, many times (like 100x) faster for particle rendering on Windows.

If you'd like to be automatically informed about future product releases you might want to sign up for our email newsletter.

EnSight 9.0.3(c) - client, server, SOS & DR and enliten

Here is the list of what is new in EnSight, 9.0.3c.

EnSight 9.0.3c is a bug fix release. This is not intended as a "new features" release. New features will be coming in EnSight 9.1 which is scheduled for a November release. In that version you will find the new Volume Rendering, Welcome Screen, Session Files and more.

Here's what is improved with the client, server, server-of-servers (sos) and the free EnLiten 3D viewer. In our previous post we talked about what is new in the readers.

EnSight Client Client/server hangs after creating a query show expand part. Hidden animated particle traces on Windows cause rendering problems in -X (sw) mode Bad image quality with transparency Constants only available for one case ensight.query(ensight.PART_DISPLAY_ATTRIBUTES...) fails for nonsequential part ids. Developed surface seam line display query output of scatter plot Right-click text creation (and possibly click-n-go positioning) command journaling exports position before creates the text. solution_time: begin_step X in continuous mode sets the simulation time improperly Creating a min or max probe query can crash EnSight. Can't pick a particle trace part front z clipp plane still clips model when in orthographic mode Picking a frame in frame mode can cause program termination Splash screen does not show the image, just empty space. variable selection from HUM not working properly query marker not scaled properly if scatter plot Scenario cannot be overwritten Mouse Input fails in some multi-monitor configurations Incomplete image saves when saving the image from a python script Printing may fail to some devices The moment() function did not always record the proper cursor location Cursor location resolution was truncated during recording for extrusion and queries dconfig setups when the "main display" was not the upper left corner were off scaling of point elements by variable does not work Case->Replace does not use DEFAULT setting Errors from Case->Replace archive files don't store correct server host Modifying the 'DEFAULT' JLC item can crash the EnSight client The -cip client option is ignored. Saving views after saving a csf file from a python script crashes the client Various launch fixes Save scenario dialog layout gets confused Views manager dialog hidden if opened via the push button Ensi_ files left in TMPDIR EnSight Server inconsistent normals between computational and visual mirror Exporting sub-ranges of constant variables still exports full range of constant variable values ens_checker could have trouble with single file format Difficulty computing a general equation Q-criteria gives different results than when computed literally Computing PresDynam with a constant density created via the calculator produces all undefined values. point part that has been meshed to "line" update problem ens_checker was updated to deal with the 1.1 version of the .erb file format elevated surface in wrong normal direction from a clip plane updating structured ranges could cause part to disappear portions of a few surface restricted traces can stray of the surface Saving nfaced as tets (ENSIGHT_SAVE_NFACED_AS_TETS) can crash the server Redefine an equation on a different set of parts server crashes when using Casemap() EnLiten EnLiten may crash with particle traces of 0 length Can't restore a 8.2 scenario file written on an HP with animated traces EnLiten may crash with a playlist EnSight Gold and EnSight DR, including SOS If one uses the login id: field in an SOS casefile, it won't connect. Images saved in EnSight DR are corrupt