We are pleased to announce that there are two new faces here at EKK.

Kathy Longo is our new Office Manager. Kathy comes to us with both a strong accounting and information systems background. She is currently streamlining the administrative aspects of our business. Soon she will also take on an active role in marketing our software products and consulting services.

Steve Elmore is a graduate student at the University of Michigan. We've hired him as a co-op student to help us work on our current research projects and to assist in the consulting side of the business.

As always, we continue to advocate using the LINUX operating system on PC workstations. With technology changes, the preferred CPU occasionally changes. We recently purchased an Intel Xeon machine, and were quite surprised with the boost in number crunching performance. We have a CAP benchmark that we use here to determine relative speeds of different machines. Here is a comparison of a PIII 850, an Athlon 1800+, and a 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon:
 

This comparison is not quite fair in that it does not compare processors with similar CPU speeds (and CAP performance is not solely dependent on CPU speed). It does allow you to see the progress that has been made in hardware performance.

Along with CPU speed, we have determined that the video card performance in a workstation can impact our software's performance. We have done a little experimenting with different offerings from ATI and NVIDIA, and we can give recommendations based on CAPCAST's graphics performance. If you would like more information, please let us know.

In last month's 'Did You Know?' section, we mentioned that CAPCAST's fluid flow software has the ability to accurately model fluid flow using parametric mesh deformation in the shot sleeve. We want to stress that CAPCAST is the only casting simulation software package available that can model a shot sleeve in this way and then continue the analysis through the rest of the cavity. This allows you to visualize the effects of different shot speeds on the amount of air trapped in the cavity. Dr. Kim recently demonstrated this capability at the USCAR Structural Cast Magnesium Development project's quarterly review meeting this past December. X-Ray imaging of a large magnesium die casting correlated well with the CAPCAST fluid flow results. If you are a USCAR member, please contact Don Penrod for the complete report. Otherwise, please revisit this link for an example, and request a demo for your process using this new technology.

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