Autodesk announced last week the release of the Autodesk Cloud, the first steps in our exploration of future platforms for computing. I'll leave it to my marketing and sales colleagues to provide the particulars, but thought it might be useful to consider the implications of the emerging cloud for the building industry.
While architects, engineers and builders have always been engaged and enthusiastic about digital technology, low margins, lack of capital and a general aversion to risk have prevented most AEC players from broad, enterprise-wide investment in technological innovation. The appearance of the personal computer in the mid-eighties was an important tipping point in that commoditized technology was finally available to the myriad small businesses that are the backbone of our industry and moved us, albeit late, to the computer age. The internet connected those computers for us, and the combination of the two converted the theoretical possibilities of BIM into practice. Cloud computing is likely the next accelerator, and in my view, a huge game changer for the building industry.
Let's stipulate that building projects of all kinds are huge CPU and storage hogs, and that today's increasingly large personal computers have helped but certainly not kept up with those demands. Seems to me that our customers are constantly pressing these boundaries, ahead of hardware and software capabilities, the more they embrace model-based approaches. Supporting your BIM process with thousands of CPUs in concert with what is essentially infinite storage certainly won't hurt. And having that stored data more universally accessible is an added bonus.
But as we move from the desktop to the cloud (not just in AEC, but everywhere: see Amazon, Apple, and your local bank) I think the much-touted possibilities of BIM's transformational implications for building will come into much sharper focus. A parametric 3D building model, as a more accurate approximation of the final product, is advantageous in and of itself. But the ability to extrapolate the possibilities of that model, unconstrained by computational boundaries, is pretty titillating: generating and evaluating alternatives with both scripts and sorting algorithms that will "bound" the exploration space of options; running persistent analysis programs that report "real time" results of design decisions as the designer makes them; even keeping a continuous set of high resolution rendering cameras "viewing" the design as it unfolds, will give designers and builders completely new insights into how projects are unfolding. Even more importantly, it will simultaneously increase insight and free us to explore and solve, using our synthetic and creative abilities and leave the mundane "in the cloud." I'm betting that, once we get over some initial giddiness and sloppy form, we'll build better as a result.
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Posted by: Virvey | October 03, 2011 at 03:14 AM
I see where this is going and wondering who pays for all this horsepower. I suppose it becomes part of the cost of doing business for all those entities hosting such and included in the price of whatever good/service is being sold. When the only way to access current (and I know there is an army of release 14 types out there still and they won't go away ever, just fade into ever increasing degrees of irrelevance)cad/bim software is by logging into the cloud based programs via subscription, then the cost will not be an issue. I think too that as the team approach becomes more universal as a construction business model that if a player wants on the team he is going to have to be up to speed with his licenses. For these donosaurs this OLD-BIM or even worse NON-BIM could become a new form of "Lonely BIM".
Posted by: fishandchips47 | October 07, 2011 at 09:51 AM
chance of BIM possibly, but apparently not where you teach (Yale) at least not yet insofar as their recent building upgrade program throughout which they failed as an owner to practice what you no doubt teach (for them). I wasn't directly involved in all the projects, but the Art Gallery renovation I played a very small part in suffered very much from the traditional architectural and engineering (2d) approach to visualization, accompanied by the usual army of RFI and change orders. The GC did his level best to use more modern approaches to his craft, but it wasn't pretty.
Posted by: fishandchips47 | October 07, 2011 at 10:08 AM
Hyper-hype, then more of the same. The real reason for the cloud approach is to 'stop' software piracy - that's it, period. Your job as ADSK minion is to spin it so that it appears to be an advantage to the paying customer, but that's very hard sell - especially since we won't all have petabit WAN connections on every desktop for another decade. Because you have such a difficult task, you have some of my sympathies, but since you are well paid by ADSK, those sympathies are limited.
Posted by: Tomahawk4196 | October 12, 2011 at 07:41 AM
Two quick comments: first, while the Architecture School at Yale has scant involvement with Facilities here on campus, several major projects underway--including Foster's new Business School and Stern's new Residential Colleges--are BIM jobs. As regards "hyper-hype," acknowledging the source of my paycheck I would observe that our first foray into cloud computation for AEC users was Green Building Studio--energy analysis software that can't run on a desktop (too intensive) and offered free to our Revit customers (no revenue). No petabit WAN connection necessary. Just a reference point.
Phil
Posted by: Phil Bernstein | October 12, 2011 at 09:12 AM
The moral of this story is that the user was smart enough to reach out to Autodesk, and guess what? This is a known issue! However, they haven’t yet been able to identify the root of the problem because of the very nature of the random behavior. It should go without saying that if Autodesk can’t reproduce the issue, they can’t fix it
Posted by: scratch projects | October 16, 2011 at 04:40 PM