"I am not that familiar with the strategy of the Project 114 Community yet, but if the Calc Engines are free available for use, even as proprietary as .exe or .dll files, then it must be a question about whether one self want to use them, i.e. one can make an interface and use them with ones own GUI, whether it is cloud computing or other like Excel or Visual Studio, or am I wrong?"
The goal Is not to make all calc engines free, although many might offer their own or organizations might find money to update and convert good (lost) legacy code. The goal is to separate the calculations from any one GUI front end and to define them in a way to give them a long life and many uses. Right now, each set of calculations are tied to one interactive GUI. Calculations cannot be combined in any automated way. However, most all calc engines work the same way - they read a set of input and write a set of output. Project 114 defines a standard way for all calc engines to read and write that data from/to text files and defines a way to define the variables to the rest of the world. The goal is to offer open/free software to read and write these files. The huge issue with IGES is the vague 600 page manual and lack of any common software for everyone to use. The other goal of Project 114 is to provide open source frameworks (GUI front ends in Excel) that handle many specific sets of calculations. The first one provided allows you to launch and analyze any ONE calc engine without writing a ling of code. All that the calc engine has to do is to read and write the input and output in a standard way and to define the inputs and outputs in a standard text file. It should be a simple task for any programmer to isolate calculations in a separate batch or console app using that I/O organization.
An example I gave once described a call I received this past summer about a sailboat designer who came up with an automated way to create sailboat hull shapes. The code was written inside of ProEngineer and built a surface model using their tools. He then was able to generate a mesh and manually feed it to a CFD program called FlowLogic. His goal was to separate the different pieces so that the process could be automated. You can't search for an optimum hull if you have to interactively launch each application, and you cannot expect to get all of the source code (hull generation, NURB surface creation, meshing, and CFD code). However, with the Project 114 organization, one might obtain and combine each of the separate calc pieces from many different sources. You do not need the source code and no interactive user control will be required. In theory, each piece could be located in different parts of the cloud.
In addition, Project 114 would like to include other open/free framework models that use these same calc engine plug-ins. A common calculation model is a free body diagram. The Velocity Prediction Program for sailboats defined all of their forces and moments that way. One could provide a general open/free FBD calc program in Excel that could launch any external calc engine that provided a force or moment. In that way, one might easily replace the traditional Delft III hull resistance "calc engine" with a complex CFD calc engine without writing a line of code. You could replace the sail-force coefficients with your own special numbers. The FBD framework in Excel would be free and all you would have to do is to add a list of calc engines to launch and define which output variables are the forces and moments. When calc engine writers create the calc engines, they do not need to know how the calculations will be used. That is up to the GUI/Framework. However, this does not stop others from launching calc engines from a custom GUI front end program written in any language.
More to come...
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Stephen Hollister
Chief Executive Officer
New Wave Systems Inc
United States
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