Engineering Applications?

[apl175]

I work for a certain "fortune 100" company with a diverse manufacturing/services focus.

We use many engineering applications and engineering analysis programs like ANSYS, Abaqus, CFX, Unigraphics, I-Deas, ProEngineer, Fluent, Dytran/Nastran/Patran and the like - I can probably name over a dozen more. Primarily these are run on Xeon powered Wintel workstations, and on UNIX systems from HP and SGI for long-run computational analysis.

Why aren't we seeing these applications ported for Macintosh - it would seem to me that these mathematically and graphically intense applications would be perfect for a G4 Macintosh, and given the fact that all of these applications have multiple UNIX derivations, that the porting would be easy. Some of the programs do have support for Linux platforms on the Intel side.

or is Apple's marketing model not out to conquer the [engineering] workstation market [yet]?

 

[substrate]

I'm an electrical engineer who designs integrated circuits at one of Fortunes "Top 100 places to work" and I think I can understand why MacOS X isn't supported.

First, these companies are in business to maximize their profits. Porting the applications that I use to Sun unix boxes is a no-brainer, that represents the bulk of their licenses. Linux on Intel hardware is becoming a good choice from their perspective, it's rapidly expanding as a platform in the ECAD field because it represents a much higher performace/cost ratio than any other UNIX system. How did this happen? First, linux appeared on engineers desktops. For a lot of us it was by going our own way and telling the support people in our company to bugger off. Linux supports X windows so it was easy to run jobs on the traditional big iron unix server and display back to our desktop.
<p>
Eventually we the traditional big iron unix server starts to look a little long in the tooth. It still runs just as fast as it ever did, but the designs we work on are increasingly complicated. We then realize that we could in general get far more performance for the dollar if these applications could be ported to linux. We pester our vendors about this. We pester them some more, and finally about 6 years later EDA tools on linux start to roll out.
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Even though these are ports from one unix to another there were still a lot of problems. Analytical tools such as simulators would yield wrong results due to differences in floating point hardware. Performance was often very slow, especially considering the clock rate advantage, due to differences in libraries. Eventually this gets worked out, but only after a couple more years of beta releases. Obviously this costs a lot in terms of R&D for the tool companies so they only want to do this for markets that they see as growing.
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For this to happen to MacOS X first people have to clamor for the tools and show that there's a huge market waiting to be exploited. This means that companies would have to opt for running applications remotely on big iron first, or, somebody has to actually pay for the port (this is not uncommon, the company I work for used to pay to have a few key applications ported to our hardware - not cheap and the porting fee is per version)