Thread-safe Capability Now Standard with ACIS® 3D Modeler

Spatial Takes the Lead in Promoting Development of Multi-Threaded Applications.

BROOMFIELD, Colo - Spatial Corp., a leading provider of 3D development components for design, manufacturing and engineering applications, today announced that thread-safe capabilities are now included standard with ACIS 3D Modeler. Greater end-user demand for higher application performance and the growing ubiquity of multi-core hardware platforms is driving the development of multi-threaded applications. Spatial is taking the lead in support of these development efforts by providing thread-safe as a core ACIS capability.

McMaster University has implemented ACIS thread-safe capabilities in both a machining tool path optimizer and a rapid prototyping wall thickness verification program. “Using parallelism, we have achieved exciting speed improvements in our manufacturing software applications,” said Allan Spence, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at McMaster University. “Working with the Spatial team and tools, we were quickly able to implement multi-threaded capabilities, realizing near 3x speed-up on a quad core computer. For over 15 years, our use of Spatial products have provided us with an excellent and progressive platform solution for our manufacturing technology research and development.”

In addition to providing partners the foundation for developing high-performing multi-threaded applications, thread-safe capability enables Spatial to deliver thread-hot ACIS functions. For example, in ACIS R20 Spatial introduced multi-threaded entity-point-distance (MTEPD) functionality. Improving the performance of this function is especially important in metrology applications where point-to-point distance calculations between the design model and manufactured parts can number in the millions. MTEPD tests have shown calculation times can be improved by up to 70% depending on the size of the model and the number of points being evaluated.

“One major reason our development partners choose ACIS as their 3D geometry kernel is because Spatial continues to advance the platform. Developers make use of these technology advancements to extend their application’s competitive advantage,” stated Ray Bagley, Spatial Director of Product Planning and Management. “The value of ACIS continues to increase as we expand its capabilities to address present and future software needs across a growing set of industry applications and platforms.”

ACIS thread-safe capabilities were first introduced by Spatial last year. For compute-intensive operations, the result is near linear performance scaling on multi-core systems. Computer-aided design, engineering analysis, manufacturing and metrology applications realize significant performance gains when faceting, sectioning, and performing most ACIS modeling operations which work on multiple independent parts.