In this article, Chris France, CIO of Little Diversified Architectural Consulting, a 225 person firm located in Charlotte NC, describes how they built a private cloud that included their high performance graphics workstations. A private cloud differs from the public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services or Google by the fact that the cloud computing infrastructure and resources are controlled by the individual business that deploys it. Little’s cloud is the first AEC workstation cloud in production and is on track to reduce the firm’s workstation and laptop hardware expense by 67% ($2M) over the next 10 years. The article also describes many of the additional business benefits the firm has achieved through its workstation cloud approach and shares some of its implementation details.
AEC Exhibitor Highlights from Autodesk University 2009
January 14th, 2010This article provides an overview of the many AEC-related applications that were on display at the Exhibit Hall at Autodesk University 2009, including new design visualization solutions such as 3D digital holograms from Zebra Imaging, a new 3D real time exploration and navigation solution called Nova that works with Revit models, several 3D printing devices, many supporting BIM technologies that integrate with Revit, and several structural, civil, and site engineering solutions.
URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/buildingthefuture/2010/AU2009_Exhibitors.html
The Role of agcXML in Streamlining Information Exchange
December 14th, 2009This article, authored by Michael Tardif, Director of Integrated Project Delivery Systems at Grunley Construction Company, Inc., discusses the rationale for the agcXML, which was developed by the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) in collaboration with NIBS as a standard to support the exchange of business information during design and construction.
Bentley Architecture V8i
November 19th, 2009This review explores the improvements in the new V8i version of Bentley Architecture, including its new conceptual design and space planning capabilities, dynamic views that ensure better drawing coordination, new display styles that allow high-quality presentation graphics to be easily created, native support of Rhino and SketchUp files with live links, and the new Luxology rendering engine that allows high-end renderings and animations to be created within the application.
URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/review/2009/BentleyArchV8i.html