Running Catia in UNIX?

[TobyH]

Our company currently has a single seat of Catia running on Windows XP 64bit. We are looking to purchase 1 or more seats in the near future, but we were curious if anyone had seen major performance benefits by running UNIX machines instead of Windows? Is there special hardware requirements to run UNIX, or can I simply install it on the same computer?

Thanks in advance,
Toby

 

[PeterGuy]

UNIX of the varieties supported by CATIA require particular hardware AIX - PowerPC IBM hardware, Solaris - Sparc SUN hardware HPUX - HP hardware. There are differences in preformance and some would argue stability coming from the differences in archtecture & memory model. However CATIA V5 is coded using VisualStudio 2005 on the windows platform (this is where the code in native and therefore fastest)

 

[ferdo]

Hi,

There are also another criteria which you have to take in consideration....

Would you like to develop your own automation tools (in other words, what would you like to use CATScripts, catvbs or catvba?) You can use vba only in Windows..

Do you want for your users to create office documents from their workstations?

If I remember correctly there are also differences in hardware prices...

About stability...I don't know what to say, but from my experience I noticed that CATIA on UNIX its not crashing so fast when you are loading huge assemblies...and from what I know, all major aircraft and auto companies are using UNIX (maybe because they already have these hardwares and OS?)

Anyway, in some companies they are buying also new UNIX workstations (maybe because they have some old procedures and standards and they don't want to change?)

Do you have a PDM system? Or another collaborative enterprise system?

Think in the future....



Regards
Fernando

 

[catiajim]

One more thing - IBM is discontinuing the RS6000 Line. There basically are no more Unix Workstations for running CATIA.

As for performance - CATIA V5 was written for Windows. Running it under any flavor of Unix involves some interpretation of the Windows calls and conversion to Unix calls - which does not help performance at all. Way back in the early versions of V5, It barely ran in Unix while it ran just fine in Window. It's not quite so bad any more.

 

[begnor]

I run both sides of the coin here at work, and I much prefer the function in UNIX vs. Windoze, but I am biased to UNIX from working on it longer. I do not notice any major performance issues speed wise, but I hardly ever get the "Click OK to Terminate" like on the PC. There are times when functions that bomb the PC work like a charm on UNIX. Could be a memory issue, not sure since I get no warning, V5 just bombs out requiring a full cold restart. Ford requires UNIX, since they refuse to support PC based TeamCenter and V5 together, even though both will run on PC, and I have seen them run both on PC laptops in update training sessions. Go figure....

One other thing that bothers me about the PC side is how we maintain our drawings for EC releases. We want to keep all old release levels in one document so here's what happens: I copy/paste the entire page in UNIX, and all dimensions, GD&T and notes are there in the copied page views. If I open the same drawing file on the PC and do the exact same thing, half or better of the dimensions will be lost in multiple views. I am not sure if it has something to do with the Ford-specific system settings of V5 on UNIX or just one of those things, but it is a major time waster on the PC to have to interrogate view to view to make sure all the stuff is there. So for now, I copy pages on the UNIX box to preserve everything, then just run the update view function on the PC. Copying views to a new page in UNIX is no help either, gives me the same problem as seen on the PC.