Future of FEA software = Web?

[ParabolicTet]

Will all analysis software eventually be run through a web-browser? With online conferencing software one can access any remote PC and control it as though it were your own. It would be much better if FEA softwares could be available in such a way.

The customer would not have to worry about installing, maintaing and running complicated software on their machine. The vendor would be able to ensue the customers are always using the latest and greatest release of their software. Sounds like a win-win situation? What do you think? Of course issues related to allocating server resources would need to be managed.

http://web.peoriadesignweb.com/calculator

- Online Engineering Spreadsheet Caclulators

 

[flamby]

I don't think, I quite swallow this for now. The FEA programs on my machine are black boxes enough, and I have hard time figuring out what is going on inside it. Add it to the complexity of transporting all the processes to some remote server and I am left absolutely nothing but the answers to a problem without any clue to the processes.

Any FEA is a continuous process of analysis and remodelling. This will need a huge bandwidth to tranfer the data back and forth several times. I do not think my present connectivity with the web is satisfactory for such applications.

However, considering that many advances will take place in future on internet-data-exchange, such a thing can not be ruled out completely. Then a super computer eqipped with a super program of FEA, costly enough to justify a server based processing, will become a reality. Perhaps for a job in which many countries will join their hands for a combined exploration into the space.

Ciao.

 

[GregLocock]

I used to write my models at work, write them to tape, drive to a bureau, upload the model from there via acoustic coupler to the USA, where it would run, and then a week later I'd go and pick the tape up.

Just looking at a job I did yesterday. In 3 hours, running a tiny model through many iterations I generated 300 Mb of data. Over a dialup that is 20 hours of data transfer, and even on what they laughingly call broadband in Australia that is about 5 hours of data transfer(I think).

There again if you had told me 10 years ago that I could run reasonably complex FEA models at home, on the cheapest PC available, with free software (Z88), fairly quickly, then I wouldn't have believed you. So things will change .





Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[ParabolicTet]

Somebody wrote a 3-D FEA analysis tool in Java. I can't recall the URL and I can't find it on google. I just checked the site a few weeks ago and should have bookmarked it, very cool. Maybe someone else know?

http://web.peoriadesignweb.com/calculator

Online Engineering Spreadsheet Caclulators

 

[GregLocock]

Impact is a non linear FEA written in Java. You can get it from sourceforge, I think, yes, here ya go

http://sourceforge.net/projects/impact/

Cheers

Greg Locock