Happy Friday and Happy New Year, folks! This week’s roundup looks at what we thought 2013 would look like 10 years ago, how engineers are getting creative to keep massive supercomputers cool, and a new computer-based method to figure out a drug’s side effects before it hits the market.

Enjoy!

• The Future Is Now: What We Imagined for 2013 — 10 Years Ago
• Meshing Your Design for Analysis: Which Path to Take?
• New Method for Uncovering Side Effects Before Drugs Hit the Market
• A Novel Ship Extends Shell’s Reach
• Engineers Hunt For Ways to Cool Computing

Wired Magazine
The Future Is Now: What We Imagined for 2013 — 10 Years Ago

“I remember when…” may be something you heard over the holidays the past few weeks from older family members as they discussed watching their families’ first TV or gas at 15 cents per gallon. However, being that ANSYS technology helps organizations develop new products through simulation, it is always interesting to see what companies will design and might become the “I remember” moments 50 years down the road.

In 2003, Wired predicted what might be available in 2013 and analyzed how close they came to what actually happened. But why stop there: check out how we might be living by 2023.

Desktop Engineering
Meshing Your Design for Analysis: Which Path to Take?

As we all know, engineers are increasing their use of simulation to analyze the behavior of products before they move to the physical prototype phase.

An essential part of this process is meshing, or subdividing the design into a mesh of 2D or 3D elements defined by nodes. A recent Desktop Engineering piece highlights the meshing options that are available to engineers using simulation and talks about the benefits of each method.

Typically, there are three meshing choices:

• work within today s CAD-embedded programs;
• use tools native to a separate analysis package; or
• bring in a specialized third-party tool.

ANSYS’ perspective is that meshing is an integral part of the simulation process and should be as automated and integrated as possible.

What do our readers think?  Which meshing method do you prefer?

Science Daily
New Method for Uncovering Side Effects Before Drugs Hit the Market

Anyone that follows medical news probably is aware that drug side effects are a major health concern.  Actually, it’s the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S. That’s what it’s great that a group of scientists have figured out a new method that is more cost-effective and accurate than traditional approaches and determines a drug’s potential side effects BEFORE it hits the market. If you guessed that they used a computer-based approach, you’d be correct!

The full report is in ACS’Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, but basically, this new method could be helpful in uncovering serious side effects early in the development and testing of new drugs, avoiding costly investment in medications unsuitable for marketing.

The Wall Street Journal
A Novel Ship Extends Shell’s Reach

Technology is just really cool – and Shell’s latest and greatest oil-drilling ship is no exception.

The ship drilling wells 140 miles south of New Orleans. Photo courtesy The Wall Street Journal and Royal Dutch Shell

Shell’s Noble Bully 1 is unlike any other oil-drilling ship out on the water today. The ship’s design helps Shell drill wells faster, more safely and at a lower cost than ever before. Though smaller than its predecessors, Shell says the Bully has just as much thrusting power and storage capacity as conventional drilling ships. And is packed with technology.

Some of the technology on board includes built-in GPS, wind sensors, motion sensors and compasses, a hydraulic system, and computer-controlled thruster propellers on the bottom of the vessel. All of this contributes to helping Shell drill wells with new precision. What’s more, the ship has unmanned submarines, equipped with robotic arms and high-def video cameras, that, if needed, can be shot off the ship and guided to the drilling operation on the ocean floor. It even operates with 40% less workers than a typical drilling ship.

Think they used engineering technology to help design this one-of-a-kind ship?

Scientific American
Engineers Hunt For Ways to Cool Computing

I’m sure we’ve all experienced this before — sitting down to get a bit of work done, putting your laptop on your knee and feeling the heat.

Now imagine a computer that operates at 3 petaflops (3 × 10¹⁵ operations per second) and the heat that it produces — yowza!

Experts say that keeping massive supercomputers cool is increasingly becoming one of the biggest challenges in advancing the industry. So, engineers are exploring new ways of cooling these massive machines like pumping liquid coolants directly on to computing chips rather than circulating air around them.

This piece is pretty long, but it goes into other ways engineers are looking to keep these supercomputers cool like electrochemical power, electrolyte cooling and many others, and is pretty interesting.

If you were looking to solve this problem, what would you use to keep things cool?

Enjoy your weekend!