Shashlik with Oleg Shilovitsky

Today, in Raanana, Israel, I met Oleg Shilovitsky. We ate several types of shashliks/kebabs and discussed some issues of mutual interest. Among them (the issues, not shashliks): semantic methods in data management, prospects of PTC, Autodesk, DS, ASCON, TopSystems, what are chances of SolidEdge, business of Inforbix, business of LEDAS, iPhone-4, Twitter, COFES, isicad, and many other.  

Our conclusion: life is hard but very interesting. 

Just our thoughts:) 

What is the Strength of LEDAS? Part II

Stepan Gatilov, a young LEDAS employee, can be characterized by at least three facts. He:

- is a silver medalist of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, a two-time finalist of Topcoder Open (Algorithm) in Las Vegas, repeatedly participated in many other programming competitions, one of the coaches of a team of programmers  of the  Novosibirsk University,

- works successfully in one of the LEDAS key projects,

- closely acquainted with President Dmitry Medvedev.

1. Said Stepan: Olympiad programming (programming, math, physics, and other contests are in Russian usually called Olympiads) is very useful: thanks to it I learned to write codes rapidly and almost:) without bugs. Also for such Olympiads you need master a lot of standard algorithms and methods. This results in good understanding of what works fast and what works slow and how to improve performance of the latter. Unfortunately, Olympiad programming does not teach you how to work in large projects because their tasks usually consist of not more than couple pages of very sophisticated code…      

2.  Well, Stepan acquires skills of industrial software development in the projects of LEDAS, see ledas.com and drivingdimensions.com. In particular, he works at a non-linear solver which is actually a computational core of main LEDAS products: from geometric solvers (LGS 2D and LGS 3D) to applications like LDD SketchUp and  LDD Rhino.

3. Stepan Gatilov met Dmitry Medvedev in 2007 when the Novosibirsk programming team became a silver medalist of a programming world championship in Japan. At that time, current Russian President was just a first deputy of the  Russian prime minister. This is a dialog between S.Gatilov (SG, at the photo, second from right) and D.Medvedev  (DM, third from right).

SG: We have been participating in programming Olympiads, well, defending the honor of the country, but back home we're having some problems with our university lessons. Just today, for example, I skip my second consecutive Colloquium on English.

DM: If you wish, I can write an excusable note to your teacher…

SG: I believe it would be more effective if you write an autograph on a postcard 

DM: OK, no problem. You are really smart guy! What is your teacher’s name?

SG: Irina Gennad’evna

DM: Well, when being a university professor, I took a lot of exams but such excuse is something new for me… Is your Colloquium today?  

SG: Yes, the first one was when I was in Tokio, the second – today.

DM: Interesting, they organize Olympiads just when you should pass your colloquiums! If you will further be so successful you may probably miss some more university colloquiums.   

SG: No, no, I should attend them!

DM: Why?

Тatiana Tchurina (trainer): For the University, the key point is studying, not Olympiad.  If somebody gets “satisfactory” (the more so – unsatisfactory!), we do not take such a student to our Olympiad team. This is policy of the university.

DM: So, I am writing: “Irina Gennadievna, Stepan missed your lesson by excusable reasons, please do not scold him!”

SG: Thank you! What about making a photo together with you?

DM: No problems, with pleasure!

See What is the Strength of LEDAS. Part 1   

Source about meeting with D.Medvedev .  

Petaflops With NVIDIA in Moscow University

The Russian office of NVIDIA informed that today Moscow Lomonosov University installed graphic processors NVIDIA Tesla™ on its supercomputer (also called Lomonosov) which tranforms it into one of the fastest computers worldwide. 

A hybrid extension of "Lomonosov" includes 1554 graphic processors NVIDIA Tesla X2070 and the same number of 4-core CPU, which provides the system with a pick performance of 1.3 petaflops. Among the projects supported by "Lomonosov" there are  global climate change, mechamisms for formation of galaxies, post-genome medicine, and others.     

Two other Russian examples of supercomputing with NVIDIA. Moscow Keldysh Institute for Applied Math uses 192 processors NVIDIA Tesla C2050 for research in nuclear energy, aviation, and oil production. Nyzhny Novgorod University is the first Russian Research CUDA center which actively uses GPU in biology based on 100 teraflops GPU cluster which in 2012 will be enhanced to 500 teraflops.  

LEDAS Skills Are Used By World Leading Developer Of CAD/CAM Software For Sheet Metal And Aerospace Industries To Make Its Products Better

If you read my recent post "Draft Sight of Monaco" you could probably notice a remark that "LEDAS has in Monaco a good customer whiсh can probably become very good but so far asked me not to mention in my blog a name of the company...". Today I've got a permission to unveil this information.

Our Monaco customer is a comparatively small but VERY successful company JETCAM. At its website one can read that JETCAM was founded in 1986 to develop and market software systems for computer numerical control programming of punching and cutting machines used in sheet metal fabrication and composite cutting... JETCAM is represented in a wide variety of independent sheet metal machine shops, manufacturing everything from simple heavy gauge components to the most sophisticated and delicate components employed in the electronics and aerospace industries. A good representative example of the JETCAM offering is JETCAM Expert which reduce material waste, programming time and run-time.   

JETCAM's world-class user base also includes some of the best known and most demanding companies in the world, such as ABB, Bombardier (Canada and Northern Ireland), Embraer, Kone Elevators, General Electric, Siemens, Volvo, Lucent, John Deere, Ericsson and several major racing car manufacturers including Red Bull Technology.

With its impressive set of customers and success stories, JETCAM constantly receives a lot of requests to complement its products by new functionality, to improve their performance, scalability, architectural ability for extensions and integrations, and so on. Such challenges very well fit capabilities and commitments of LEDAS to apply its unique competence in science-intensive software engineering based on computational mathematics, geometry, combinatorial analysis and other.

The contracts between JETCAM and LEDAS have been under implementation since the beginning of 2011. From that time, the already obtained results of cooperation have confirmed mutual expectations of the parties and was several times extended. The recent visit to Monaco enabled the partners to prepare a long-term framework agreement which provides a solid base for reliable and efficient long-term cooperation.  

By the way, JETCAM is quite well known to Russian technologists since its products are succesfully distributed in Russia by Delcam-Ural .  

  

One of the JETCAM key managers, Stan Stern is spending this week at LEDAS, in Novosibirsk Scientific Center, to discuss with a LEDAS team the details of some JETCAM projects.  At the photo below, Alex Ershov, LEDAS CTO, and Stan Stern are near one of the Technopark buildings which is intensively under construciton and to which LEDAS is going to move next spring or earlier. See also "LEDAS Joins Siberian High-Tech Business Technopark". 

    

BIM in Russia: Now About Modeling of an Ancient Church

Earlier,  in my blog I have several times presented the isicad.ru Big BIM Discussion. This time,  my task became much easier - thanks to a recent guest editorial by Alexander Bausk "BIM Discussion Gets Heated in Russia" published by Ralph Grabowski in his upFront.eZine #692.

Today isicad.ru presented the 15th isicad-BIM-article of Vladimir Talapoff, a professor of Novosibirsk Architecture University. This is something new: first, the paper is about modeling of an old Siberian wooden church, and, second, now Vladimir has a co-author, a nice girl - a post-graduate student who made all the modeling by means of Autodesk instruments - mainly by Revit and some minor use of AutoCAD. See a part of the model: 

The wooden church built in 18 century in Eastern Siberia: 

was in 1971 carefully moved to the open-air museum of Novosibirsk Scientific Center (where isicad.ru and LEDAS are operating):

The article states that although the BIM means available today are mostly oriented to design of new buildings and constructions, nevetherless a presented project practically proved that BIM can be applied for modeling of architectural monuments as well. The autors believe that effective information modeling of historic buildings should involve at least two different methods. One - "the traditional approach" can be used for brick and stone buildings while "discrete" method is natural for wooden and other dismountable / portable constructions. This article explains discrete approach which enables individual tracing of every element of a buiding.

I recommend you to take a look at the today's Russian publication for at least to see a lot of  pictures and examples of modeling.

Formula 1 Grand Prix de Monaco 2011: Some Sights and Sounds

During our business trip to Western/South Eutope Dmitry Ushakov - LEDAS CEO and I,  visited Gent (Belgium), Paris, and Monaco-Nice. This was briefly illustrated by my 4 previous posts. One of the most exciting (to say nothing about business aspects:)) events of the trip was Formula 1 Grand Prix de Monaco 2011 which we were lucky to attend thanks to our calendar and  hospitality of our Monaco partners and friends.  
As an expert in F1 and an invited writer, Dmitry has artisticaly described our impressions of two days spent at Formula 1 but so far - in my Russian blog. Now we suggest you to take a look at 5 brief video clips made on May, 29 at F1 in Monaco. Note that, as everbody, we used ear gags that were sold around for couple euros:)... 


1. Drivers parade


2. Warm-up lap


3. Safety car #1


4. Fight between Vettel, Alonso and Button


5. 3 seconds before Petrov's accident