🚀 One of SDTools’ specialties is to provide ad hoc solutions in the vibration domain. When an R&D project is successful, clear and efficient simulation procedures have been devised, and documented in the output.
🤝 The ability to reproduce the process is often required by our customers, which raises the question of deployment and optimization of our MATLAB based solutions into production within the customers’ framework configuration, that may not include MATLAB.
💡 Throughout the years we encountered many use cases for which we continuously improved our solutions to fit all needs, to cover GUI integration, Runtime deployment, remote computing, external solver handling, and context-based optimization.
GUI and Runtime: process integration into a standalone application fit for production
Once a simulation procedure is stabilized, its integration in a production process requires clear input and output definition, so that scripting, console prompts, or manual tweaks shall not be necessary. This is a fundamental step for accessibility to a wider audience in project contexts.
Graphical User Interface (GUI) integration is critical to accessibility nowadays and works best with processes. Our custom applications can thus be packaged this way, based on our GUI development framework. While the layout remains simple, a clear distinction is made between the graphical layer and the application core and data to enable painless further evolution, and for our concern, to optimize synergies and maintainability of all layers.
Besides purely customer driven application interfaces, SDT features its own set of interfaced procedures, for which specific actions can be altered in the custom layer. Our project tab illustrated below allows setting working directories and storing project context. You can see a specific plots directory is given, and the report entry providing a filename that our automatic reporting and capture insertion strategies will fill. You can for example check our post about automatic reporting to get further insights: https://www.sdtools.com/automatic-reporting/
Customization is usual for our FEMLink tab, that handles model import from external codes. Many ways of constructing a working model, possibly combining input and results from other solvers, are possible. E.g. squeal simulation builds require a few additional commands and interactions with SDT-nlsim that can be bundled in the interface (prefilling, and/or alternative callbacks).
We will detail in a future post how processes can now be integrated for customized applications, stay tuned!
For such integration, since MATLAB console and editors can become optional, deployment is compatible with the fact that our customers may not already have access to MATLAB in their environment. Runtime compilation is here the solution. This enables the deployment of GUI based standalone applications, with a self-contained executable file and the free MCR program, on Windows® or Linux platforms. SDTools develops its own layer of Runtime compilation tools to integrate all external necessary features and control execution. A batch mode can also be set up to integrate advanced automated multi-software processes!
Remote computing: job handling across multi server, platform, and solver frameworks
Coming soon, stay tuned!
Distributed computing and parallelization matters, harnessing powerful frameworks
Coming soon, stay tuned!
Optimization in constrained environments
Coming soon, stay tuned!