Overall, the participants agreed that greater awareness of the potential benefits and the tools available would be important to the next growth spurt. They also agreed that more intelligence built into the software would help drive this market—and that the availability of faster low-cost computer platforms and inexpensive memory were already helping to grow the market.

One vendor was quoted as saying “The upfront tool is meant for initial analyses, using the native CAD model. It does automatic meshing, and this avoids the biggest area of possible error”.

PCI Express, faster RAM, and programmable graphics architectures are pushing the new generation of graphics boards to new heights. As programs catch up and begin to tap into the new bandwidth and processing power, users are in for a serious jump in performance and capability-including some applications you probably haven't considered.

AMD’s key OEM customers, including Sun, HP and IBM, announced today their intention to launch ground-breaking, dual-core processor-based platforms based on the non-disruptive AMD64 dual-core technology, the world’s leading x86, 64-bit computing environment. Additional partners also announced dual-core systems.

SISA plans to use ANSYS CFX to develop new generation disk drives. Ultimately, by utilizing ANSYS' leading simulation technology, SISA will save time and money on its disk drive design.

The new deskside model drives the power and scalability of Silicon Graphics Prism systems to the lowest price point ever, and allows more users to leverage the product family's breakthrough visualization capabilities for tackling problems that generate massive data sets, such as weather modeling and drug design.

"This announcement extends our commitment to the Mac OS X platform, which we've supported for more than a year," says Darin McKinnis, CEI's vice president of marketing and sales. "The new core technologies and tools in Tiger should continue to increase the Mac's appeal to EnSight users performing high-end engineering and scientific visualization for structural and fluids analysis."