Hi,

A good friend of mine is very involved in the design/CAD business. Part of his work involves translation of CAD drawings (sometimes up to sizes of 400MB files) into various formats from programs such as CATIA, unigraphics, DENAB.

Both of us have some limited knowledge of hardware but we are having some trouble configuring a system that would be ideal for such work. Price isn't a major factor, we are willing to spend upto $10000 or even 20 if the price increase gives us good performance.

Anyone know about this type of work as related to the hardware which would best accomplish the translation task? please post any specs ... much appreciated

Thanks!

SGI are the best of the best in that industry

You could go with apple but I don't belive that catia (ibm thing) works on Macs so that is out of the question.

you could build a clone system with verious os systems but your best bet would b SGI if you and your friend are not sure what you need exactly

http://www.sgi.com/industries/manufacturing/cad/

here is a link also look at their systems and talk to them.

Good Luck any more questions just ask :)

or please write the configuration problem :)

cool ... i took a quick browse around the site.

would these machines be suited for strict data translations? ... this is where our business suffers

for example, taking a unigraphics file and coverting to a generic format such as IGES can take up to two hours on our current systems and we often run out of memory. even with 2GB of RAM a large file can eat it up in no time. RAM aside, the application is very CPU intensive but doesn't involve displaying anything, its all translating one format to another

it was a bit hard to check on this posting so please just e-mail me at the above. I thought that you wanted more of a convertion and editing station. SGI is the best of the best for editing but to just conver I would ask to questions.

1) What are you using now to conver? (system spec)

2) does the system need to do anything else like editing these files?

aitrus16@yahoo.com