What CEI's customers and partners are saying about CEI's products...

“EnSight allows me to visualize my data without removing it from the server – I can visualize at LSU data that are in Texas or Illinois or California,” Blaise Bourdin, an assistant professor in Louisiana State University’s Department of Mathematics says. “I don’t have to wait until everything is transferred, and I don’t have to store it locally to view it.”

“Using a 3-D viewer provides a quick way of viewing motion and rotation at any angle without having to start the post processing all over again,” pyrotechnic engineer Christopher W. Brown at NASA’s Johnson Space Center says about CEI's EnLiten. “It allows you to view the animation, not just like a video, but something that you can rotate and move around.”   

"EnSight offers unique rendering capabilities and can handle very large models, that's why we are using it here in the lab," Brent Craven, a researcher with the Gas Dynamics Lab and the Applied Research Lab at Penn State University says. "Furthermore, the capability to fully automate data analysis and visualization in EnSight by writing script programs in the popular programming language Python is very powerful."

“It’s really convenient if you’re using a Mac, and you have a fast network connection, to port over to these machines and run EnSight off of them,” says Ph.D. candidate David Gasperino, Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota (UMN), who has been with EnSight through two upgrades over the past several years. “Most of the large commercial codes are also now exporting in EnSight format. It really is much quicker than any other viewer. For what we do, EnSight is a natural fit; it allows you to quickly elucidate interesting phenomenon within a complex 3D system.”

"And I immediately discovered an error in my model that I would never have thought of without that kind of visualization. Very slick," says Gary Bailey at the Nevada Automotive Test Center.

“With EnSight, I can watch my full simulation without having to look at just individual time steps,” Meghan Hoskins, a Ph.D. candidate in the Bioengineering program at Pennsylvania State University says. “Piecing them together has been very easy, and the fact that AcuSolve files work with EnSight is important.”

“We have a call-and-response relationship,”  Ann F. Bolger, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco said. “For example, I can request that we measure the energy that is lost throughout the flow, and the engineers can get that data out of EnSight, if I can give them the exact flow of interest. The ability to visualize these new parameters is where the rubber meets the road.”

“EnSight is the only program that could import that amount of data from ANSYS, incorporating 5 different types of elements to create the animation,”  VMI’s Matthew R. Hyre, P.E., Ph.D. says. “With the animations that Cadet Pulliam is now creating, we can show the inflation process with no balloon, just the stent, or whatever we want. When you talk numerics with most MD’s, their eyes glaze over, but if they can see the animation, it creates an immediate impact.”

"Seeing the characteristics of the blood flow is crucial to the research we are doing, and EnSight allows you to perform animations very easily," explains Karla Vega, a graduate research assistant within the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Visualization and Data Analysis group, a research enterprise at The University of Texas at Austin. "Blood flow is all about volume, and EnSight's volume rendering technique is superior to other visualization software. It's very interactive, as well, so it allows us to have more and different viewpoints than traditional software."

“None of the techniques I’ve developed are possible with our other CFD tools. The post-processing features of EnSight are just so much more powerful than any other software we use. It lets us create detailed images and manipulate the data in a way that really fits our approach,” says Ken Karbon, a staff engineer at General Motors who specializes in aerodynamics.

“I've used several programs to post-process POLYFLOW results, including Flpost and Fieldview. None of these products come close to EnSight's ability to generate and examine images and animations of forming simulations run in POLYFLOW.  The ability to export directly to EnSight, combined with EnSight's new extrusion feature, makes it the best tool for analyzing POLYFLOW results.” – Matt Hyre, PhD, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Military Institute

Andrew Hobbs, an engineer for Astec, works from England and must coordinate his research with corporate headquarters in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Remarking on the efficiency and ease he has been able to realize with CEI’s products, Hobbs says, “Any of our 50 engineers can access EnLiten files on temporary assignment just as easily as if they were at the home office, and EnLiten allows for sharing in a realistic and useful manner. We also use EnVideo to make animations of all the DEM simulations. It’s a nice easy-to-use utility.”

“EnSight has been our tool of choice for looking at these transient data sets because it has a lot of good features to animate what’s going on. It gives us the flexibility to make surfaces transparent, turn them off, change perspective, and animate the solution—all at the same time. It’s a lot more informative to look at what’s going on in the tank if we can do all those things on the fly, rather than look at a static view of the data.”  Wesley Wilson, an engineer with the Computational Fluid Dynamics group at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division, in Bethesda, MD

"We found EnSight was really very easy. There wasn’t any problem loading the data, because the formats that EnSight supports are really straightforward,” said Paul Navratil, a research assistant at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), at the University of Texas in Austin.

“EnSight gives us good tools to support problem analysis and generate animations that improve communication within our engineering community,” says Roberto P. Ramos, VSAS manager at General Motors of Brazil. “The high-quality animations that we can create in EnSight and the ability to compare different case scenarios is integral to our work.”

“EnSight’s superior animation capabilities make it the perfect choice for the work we are doing to develop innovative systems for gas-liquid and liquid-liquid separation,” says Nelson Clark, director of Clark-Koch. “A major bonus for us is the ability to embed EnLiten scenarios, which allows us to market our products through sophisticated 3D animations, printed pieces and PowerPoint presentations.”

“ANSYS products and EnSight scale very well on huge problems that are typical of the markets we serve,” says Marcus Reis of Engineering Simulation and Scientific Software (ESSS), a leading distributor of ANSYS and CEI software that provides simulation and visualization solutions for companies such as General Motors, Petrobras, Embraer, Embraco (Whirlpool), Electrolux and others. “Our customers have very demanding applications that require them to be able to quickly and easily visualize multiple results files with extensive transient analysis from ANSYS CFX and other software.” 

“The selection of EnSight Lite shows that CEI is in tune with the seismic shifts taking place in the HPC community,” says Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications, publisher of HPCwire.  “Vendors such as CEI are on the leading edge of making HPC technologies accessible to organizations of all sizes.” (CEI won a reader’s choice award from HPCwire for best price/performance visualization product or technology for their product, EnSight Lite at the 2006 Supercomputing show.)

“All of the physics are performed at the flow solver level and determines the output of the flow code,” Robert Kunz, Ph.D., head of the Computational Mechanics Division at Pennsylvania State University’s Applied Research Laboratory says. “The flow solver comes back with pressures, gas fractions, velocities, turbulence intensities, mass fraction of an inhaled substance as a function of space and time, etc. We now have many megabytes of data, and, if it’s transient, maybe gigabytes. We need a way to look at it, and that’s where CEI’s EnSight comes in.”

Red Cedar Technology CEO Ron Averill said, “We chose to license the ABAQUS Reader and others from CEI because they already have a rather complete set of interfaces to the major CAE codes. Partnering with CEI has made it possible for us to offer a large suite of robust and industry-tested interfaces quickly, without the investment of time and effort that would be required to develop and support them ourselves.”

“Since we’re looking at these mechanisms at the small scale, visualization is key for us to be able to accurately see and identify the mechanisms for deterioration,” explains Dr. Mark Horstemeyer, CAVS chair professor in mechanical engineering, Mississippi State University’s Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS). “Visualization is so effective in this process because the human eye can instantly identify and distinguish these different phenomena, and EnSight provides the best post-processing capabilities for what we’re doing.”

“EnSight Gold lets us utilize data from a variety of native formats, such as LSDyna, MSC/Nastran, MSC/Dytran, Abaqus, Fluent, and so on. We have a lot of versatility that streamlines our process,” says Fernando Toledo, VRC Manager at Wichita State’s NIAR Crash Dynamics Laboratory.

“The process that EnSight describes in its user’s manual for making movies is very straightforward and intuitive,” explained Dr. José Camberos, research aerospace engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory's Computational Sciences Center in Ohio. “An undergraduate student working with us on the project made our movies, and it was very easy for him to learn how to create them.”

“Atomistic simulations enable us to quantify the strengths of these wires during tensile failure, discover the mechanisms responsible for mechanical failure, and determine how wire dimensions, loading rates, crystal orientation and material models impact these characteristics. EnSight helps us to easily visualize our results,” says Jonathan Zimmerman, a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories.  “EnSight adds a level of quality and understanding to my research, thereby allowing the results to be accessible by a wider audience.”

Mike Long, Lead Field Engineer with Linux Networx had this to say about CEI, "We work with CEI because we want the best possible performance from our hardware.  When you have a racecar you don’t give it to a driver’s ed student.  You find the people that are pushing the limits of performance."

“There is no substitute for this type of visualization,” says Dr. John Hart, Sports Engineering @ CSES, operating out of Sheffield Hallam University. “It enables us to produce high-quality graphical output easily and quickly for detailed analysis, communication of results, and even marketing presentations.”

"EnSight has been critical to the teams work, ...because there is no other program that is comparable. By combining the visualization with our [in-house] software tool and the ability to extract certain flow features, we can really say that pressure is changing on the [arterial] walls. And if we can really understand what is going on in, say, aneurysms, then we can really use that for medical purposes,” says Dr. Alex Frydrychowicz of University Hospital Freiburg.

“EnSight allows us to be very precise for the phenomena we want to visualize,” says Alexis Lapouille of Aero Concept Engineering (ACE).  “If you have phenomena at X=1m on a calculation, for example, Fluent requires you to know where the phenomena is to generate the plane for visualization.  With EnSight, you generate an X plane and then simply move it until you find the phenomena.  Similarly, the vortex core feature allows you to find the vortex structure in very little time.”

"The ease with which we can generate animated movies in EnSight makes it possible to better understand thermal and flow phenomena inside our appliances," says Marcelo Emmel, product development engineer at Electrolux. "The visualizations enable a better collaboration with several different teams, resulting in a quick project optimization."

“EnSight is able to read changing geometries and variables for huge data sets very quickly, which was the number one thing I needed. As soon as I hit the animation in EnSight, bang! In less than 10 seconds it was running.”
-Matt Hyre, a PhD in Computational Modeling, Consultant for Emhart Glass

"Vortex core extraction would be difficult to do without EnSight. It is very important in LES to be able to study instantaneous flow. EnSight also makes it possible to make high-quality movies that allow us to study instantaneous flow in detail."
-Sinisa Krajnovic, CFD Researcher, Chalmers University

"Using the visualization as a communication tool is as important as the analysis itself. Visualization software such as EnSight allows us to share our findings with management, customers and other engineers."
-Kumar Kulkarni, Technical Specialist, Visteon

"With EnSight you have the flexibility to create section planes, where you can study different parameters such as NH3 concentration, NOx concentration, flow velocities and temperature profiles, and pressure loss," says Ali Tabikh, Alstom research engineer. "And the software allows us to show our customers how all these interactions affect the NOx removal efficiency and NH3 slip."
-Ali Tabikh, Research Engineer, Alstom Power

"We use EnSight Gold on the ImmersaDesk and CAVE environments," Iannetti says. "These environments allow us to use the NCC simulation in stereo 3D, where we are able to pick up flow features and phenomena that are not normally seen by other methods such as line plots and cut planes. The 3D environment enables people such as managers, who are not specifically familiar with the geometry, to immediately comprehend what's going on."
-Anthony Iannetti, Aerospace Engineer, Combustion Branch at NASA Glenn

"The blood moves, the walls of the heart move, there are a lot of things going on at once, so there are a number of things to study. With EnSight, we are able to more accurately study the data and truly see what is happening to each component."
-Dr. Ann Bolger, Assistant Professor of Medicine, UCSF

"We were able to see smoke propagation in buildings for different ventilation scenarios for the first time. It was much easier for us to realize the results with EnSight than it would have been using standard post-processing tools."
-Alois Schaelin, Founder and CEO, AFC Air Flow Consulting

"Visualization is crucial to evaluating the codes with which we work. Our simulations are really four dimensional (space and time), so traditional graphics are inadequate. Many of our simulations cannot be understood or interpreted by just looking at a computer monitor. The 3D structure of turbulence, shock waves, and particle simulations require us to look at them in stereographics. In the past, we have had images that we have not been able to understand, but when they are displayed using stereographics in EnSight they are quite easy to interpret."
-Dr. Lyle Long, Professor of Aerospace Engineering, Penn State University

"With EnSight Gold on the RAVE, a detailed model of an intricate structure with many components, such as a jet engine, can be viewed from all angles and diverse vantage points. We can now bring our data visualizations more 'out of the screen' than before. It is surprising how much better you can understand complex phenomena when you have more control over how you view it."
-Jay Horowitz, Visualization Manager, NASA Glenn Research Center VR Lab

"The air movement is very complex. It's driven by jet momentum, air temperature differentials (buoyancy), and wall-to-air temperature differentials that vary spatially and in magnitude. We needed to understand all of these factors and their various influences in order to improve the design of the system. We also needed to communicate our results. EnSight enabled us to create live demonstration materials and animations that convey the information in a way that's easy to understand."
-Darren Woolf, Fluid Dynamicist, ARUP

"EnSight is the best solution for the visualization and post-processing of complex CFD solutions," says Jed Lowry, a CFD analyst for the Prada Challenge 2003 team. "With a team as large as ours, spread across such distance, it was vital that each image and result that we distributed had the content required. The various feature extraction tools available within EnSight became an integral part of creating these images."
-Jed Lowry, CFD Analyst, Prada Challenge 2003 team

"ONERA chose EnSight Gold because of its superior capability to visualize generalized unstructured n-faced meshes, analyze large 3D unsteady flow solutions, as well as merge results and post-process on one screen," says Francois Vuillot, assistant director, CFD and Aeroacoustics Department for ONERA. "EnSight also enables us to unify with one tool the visualization of multi-physics simulations such as aeroacoustics and those obtained from mechanics solvers."  

Image portrays a calculation of the ground vortex generated while an airplane operates on the ground at very low speed and high power settings; the CFD code OVERFLOW was used for the simulations. Image courtesy of Drs Yoram Yadlin and Arvin Shmilovich of Boeing Company.