On Cloud or Full Cloud?

Another term that is now being thrown into the mix, when trying to understand or determine whether CAD on Cloud is a realistic option is the term "Full Cloud"– what does it mean?

Firstly, it needs to be understood is that modern CAD systems deliver a high level of functionality - which in simple terms means lots of icons, buttons, options and ways of doing things. This means lots of lines of code.

Further, the geometry representations created now can create and visualise, to close engineering accuracy, the geometry of parts and assemblies that truly represent what will be manufactured. All this means that the data being created gets bigger.

So, in conclusion, you have lots of lines of code and then large files to manipulate. How best then to put this as a Cloud application?

One way is what is termed "Full Cloud". All this information is on a server, somewhere in a server farm. You access this through your web browser (Chrome, Firefox, IE etc) and that server then sends code backwards and forwards to your browser. You then wait whilst the server processes the CAD software code, and then manipulates and manages the geometry data.

I highlight the term wait.  

You have no control over how many other people are competing for resource at the server farm, or fighting for bandwidth. Further, if you want to work somewhere where there is no or poor internet access then you can’t work. This is just how computing was before the advent of PC’s – mainframes and dumb terminals.

An alternative way is to use the power of your computer to do some of this work. In other words, you have your CAD application on your local machine doing some of the work, and then it sorts out how the geometry data files are sent to the server in the Cloud. This seems a sensible solution as then you are eliminating that competition for computer time on the server farm – you just want it to do what its good at and that is filing and managing data.

Any waiting is minimised.

Dassault’s CATIA 3DEXPERIENCE On the Cloud platform has opted for this way of architecting their software. It delivers that utilisation of all computing resource to best complete the work.

Further, it is clever enough to allow you work without internet access – there are some limitations on this, but it is practical.

So, why not try this and use our evaluation program to test CATIA 3DEXPERIENCE On the Cloud?

Read more:  'It's CAD Jim, but not as we know it ...'