AERYS COMPLETES SECOND CENGN PROJECT TO FURTHER DEVELOP PERFORMANCE OF SMARTSHAPE™

Aerys’ SmartShape™ is a 3D model/CAD visualization platform with an integrated annotation and messaging system allowing workers to collaboratively upload and view models of projects or equipment from a smartphone or a Web browser. Over the past month, Aerys has worked with CENGN to further develop the scalability of their SmartShape™ solution.

CENGN MEMBERS

THE SOLUTION

Aerys has developed SmartShape™, a collaborative real-time visualization solution that manufacturing companies can use to share dynamic 3D models of their product or design. This design is created by engineers and is available to any authorized employee to view down to the bolt details of the product. Heavy industry companies use SmartShape™ to enable their employees to stream and download 3D models of projects on consumer-grade devices such as laptops, tablets, and cellphones.

SmartShape™ cohesively bridges software design and physical engineering in order to simplify workflow processes for manufacturing companies. In their first CENGN Project, Aerys worked with CENGN to gain a clear understanding of how many users SmartShape™ could support. The purpose of Aerys’ second CENGN project was to further optimize the performance of SmartShape™ and increase the number of active users the solution can support while they view the same 3D model.THE PROBLEM

Manufacturing designs and processes can often be quite complex and even unintuitive. Large production items like vehicles, boats, and buildings need to be assembled in a sequential order and there are often several different images a worker must view in order to get a clear understanding of how an object is to be built. On top of that, the engineers that create the designs and workers who physically assemble the product need to be in sync or else no one will be satisfied with the finished product, including the customer. To ensure constant and consistent communication, production currently involves many individual images of the design and long email chains where information is likely to be lost or forgotten.

Since the engineers can continue to collaborate on designs and update the models on SmartShape™ in real-time, workers see the most updated designs. This direct connection between the engineering design team and the onsite workers creates a more efficient building process and lowers error rates as employees both in and outside the office are always looking at the same 3D model. SmartShape™ can process the most complex designs in an efficient manner providing its users with design details such as metal, screw, door types, and many more. In addition to 3D model imaging, SmartShape™ has a collaborative messaging system so users don’t even have to leave the SmartShape™ application to come into contact with another employee. Through the collaborative messaging system, users can provide feedback and complete reviews, prepare maintenance operation information, and plan upcoming procedures and tasks.

The SmartShape™ Collaboration Platform

THE PROJECT

After obtaining the scaling performance of SmartShape™ in the first project, Aerys brought SmartShape™ back to the CENGN Testbed to take measures to improve the operation and scalability of SmartShape™. In this project, SmartShape™ was deployed on a bare metal server and had 30 virtual machines (VMs) replicating 91 users accessing the same 3D image simultaneously.

This project had three main objectives:

1. Identify the optimal combination of parameters for multi-threaded file and single-threaded stream APIs. This allowed Aerys to give benchmark requirements for a customer’s number of active users. 2. Capture the resource performance (CPU, RAM, network utilization) of the SmartShape™ server as they scale up the number of users accessing the server. 3. Identify the difference in performance of multi-thread versus single-thread APIs. 4. Identify the difference in performance of HTTP versus WebSocket APIs.

CONCLUSION

This project demonstrated successful advancements made by Aerys on SmartShape™. Testing two protocols for SmartShape™ allowed the growing tech business to improve the performance they can offer clients on their multi-threaded file API protocol and take the next step in R&D for their stream API protocol. By completing another CENGN project on our infrastructure, Aerys has increased the market potential for SmartShape™.

THE RESULTS

The project provided valuable insights on using multi-threaded file and single-threaded protocols. After testing their single-threaded stream API protocol on CENGN’s infrastructure, Aerys acknowledged that stream API had potential but would need to become multi-threaded before any other optimization could be applied. During testing on the multi-threaded file API protocol, the traffic information from simulated users permitted Aerys to improve the scalability of Smartshape™. They now have a new and improved benchmark of the maximum number of active users their multi-threaded file API can support, allowing them to market their solution to clients with larger workforces.

Testing SmartShape™ with a Multi-Thread File/HTTP Protocol:

Number of Streams Loading Speed (in seconds)

31 9.5

61 12.5

91 16.5

CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE IN NEXT GENERATION NETWORKS

Rick Penwarden, Marketing Manager

rick.penwarden@cengn.ca

cengn.ca/projects

Jordan Janisson, COO

jordan.janisson@aerys.in

https://smartshape.io/en/home/