Raster To Vector

SmartDraw.com today announced that Thomson's Online Benefits, a cutting-edge employee rewards company based in London, has selected SmartDraw software to help users document company processes. SmartDraw, popular software downloaded every year by 2 million people, will be used by more than 80 employees to create swim lane diagrams, process flows, and more.

"We needed to create and use process diagrams with swim lanes to document our benefit processes," said Pete Craghill, Chief Technical Officer. "We tried Visio^® but it was very costly to have it accessible for everyone to use and view. SmartDraw gives us the flexibility to share the diagrams with everyone." Read more about SmartDraw

Moldflow Corporation (NASDAQ: MFLO), the leading provider of plastics simulation software that empowers more users to optimize more designs across their enterprise, today announced that ARRK Technical Services Ltd, with offices in Basildon and Coventry, UK, has purchased Moldflow Plastics Insight® (MPI®). To better serve their customers ARRK has standardized on MPI, the most widely used plastics simulation software for the in-depth analysis and optimization of plastic parts, injection moulds and the injection molding process itself.

ARRK’s investment in MPI provides further validation that plastics simulation is a critical component of the product development process. Running the full MPI suite of tools will allow ARRK to provide the benefits of Moldflow consulting services to all of their customers across a wide range of industries. The use of MPI aligns closely with ARRK’s Full Line service, offering customers even greater time savings in getting their products to market.

Proficiency, the leading developer of solutions that enable manufacturers and their suppliers to extract and share product knowledge from diverse engineering and manufacturing environments today introduced version 7.0 of its Collaboration Gateway™, a state-of-the-art CAD interoperability solution for the intelligent translation of data between all major CAD systems. The new version includes improved performance and reporting capabilities, 64 bit memory support, higher exchange rates based on new functionality, user enhancements for project management and new CATIA V4 to CATIA V5 functionality. Also being released is a brand new Completion Wizard™ product that interactively allows the engineer to complete and validate the final model.

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that its German subsidiary has joined the Automotive Simulation Center Stuttgart (ASCS), a groundbreaking and innovative public-private partnership aimed at advancing the automobile industry through high-performance computing (HPC). Composed of software designers, scientists and researchers and top automobile manufacturers, ASCS will combine the expertise of key scientists and industry representatives with leading-edge supercomputing technologies to conduct research aimed at developing quiet, low pollution vehicles; creating products for the market that reduce fuel consumption, lower CO2 emissions and enhance safety; increasing cost efficiency and speeding time to market with new products.

ASCS members include the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, automobile manufacturers Porsche, Daimler and Opel and software vendors ABAQUS, Altair Engineering, DYNAmore, Engineous Software and INTES, among others. ASCS will utilize industry-leading supercomputing technologies at the High Performance Computing Center at the University of Stuttgart.

Infolytica Corporation plans to release a new version of MagNet that will be available in the spring of 2008. Topping the list of new features is a total revamp of core loss calculations.

The new core loss calculation method computes the hysteresis plus the anomalous and eddy current losses in the lamination and presents them to the user as two separate fields. In a simulation, the new core loss calculation method for eddy currents takes different harmonics into account and, for hysteresis loss, it takes into account the minor loops.

"This improvement will definitely be useful to any engineer looking to improve the energy efficiency of their device" said Behzad Forghani, Vice-President at Infolytica Corporation.

Dassault Systems (DS) (Nasdaq: DASTY; Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, today announced that Dynasim, the leader in Modelica-based multi-domain systems modeling and simulation solutions, released Dymola 7.0, the latest version of its comprehensive product suite. Highlights of this new version include the support of Modelica 3.0, the latest version of the powerful object-oriented modeling language for complex physical systems, as well as support of the new Modelica Standard Library 3.0. Read more on Tenlinks.

CD-adapco today announces the release of STAR-CCM+ v3.02, their engineering process oriented computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. The newest version continues the demanding four month release schedule and introduces major enhancements over previous versions including: a dedicated facility for preparing, simulating and post-processing rotating or turbomachinery problems; a new automatic surface repair tool; and the introduction of a new DES turbulence model. Read more here.