The CAD is in the cloud @ ResBaz!

by Paul Mignone

In the near future, when University of Melbourne researchers look up in the sky, they’ll have more to look forward to than just birds and planes. They could very well find their favourite piece of design software, easily accessible from any computer, anywhere in the world. This is the goal that myself and the team at ResBaz are aiming to achieve, and it’s called ‘CAD in the cloud’.

Over the past 12 months we successfully collaborated with Autodesk, Citrix, Dell, Nvidia and VMware to test the viability of CAD in the cloud for research applications. The machine used was a Dell PowerEdge R720, which contained two NVIDIA GRID K2 GPUs, designed to deliver a high quality graphics experience to users running virtual applications. Autodesk Inventor was the CAD software chosen for the test, and it was streamed using XenApp 7.6 (installed on a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine).

I need to give a massive shout-out to Brenton Wyett from Autodesk, Michael Wang and Jared Cowart from NVIDIA and Bernard Meade from Unimelb for helping set-up the test server. This test wouldn’t have been possible without your help!

From our early pre-alpha testing, we came to realise the versatility and ease-of-use of XenApp. I was personally surprised by the performance of Autodesk Inventor on a google chromebook, which was both functional and responsive.

This could potentially mean that researchers and students would no longer be required to pay for higher-specification devices, allowing them greater flexibility when using their own device for their research and learning. 

For the alpha-test, I issued two instances of Autodesk Inventor to be used by the CAD students at the recent ResBaz conference. Besides the occasional network delay on the first day, the alpha test was incredibly successful. The video below shows an example of how it went during the three-day training course.

#autodesk inventor freeform modelling using #unimelb #cad in the #cloud #resbaz

A video posted by @senatvs_pavlvs on


Ms Andrea Rassell, a Media & Communications PhD at RMIT University said the following about her CAD in the Cloud experience:

“Overall I was very impressed with how it worked and have strained to find anything critical to say. The speed was great…and I only had a couple of instances where the program seized. Once was in response to me inadvertently asking for a massive scale shift, and the other time was after returning from lunch. I hadn’t closed down the program and it seemed to have seized at some point while we were away. I was impressed that even though Autodesk was running through the cloud and the PC I was using didn’t quite have the minimum specs required by Autodesk Inventor, I didn’t notice any lag…Also, I found the interface of the cloud app simple and easy to use.”

Dr. Joab Hwang, a post-doc researcher in biology at Monash University was impressed by the performance of the alpha-test. What he found particularly useful was that CAD in the cloud worked seamlessly on Mac OS/X, an operating system used by many reserachers, yet engineering software rarely supports. His interview is in the YouTube link below.

So what’s the moral of the story? CAD in the cloud is definitely possible. While the alpha-test at ResBaz identified some rough edges to iron out, researchers clearly saw the value of CAD in the cloud, and want more of it. Our next challenge will be to test Autodesk Maya and 3DS Max with Dr. Mike Kuiper and his newly established Bio-visualisation group. Stay tuned for details!