Towards multiprocessor feature recognition

The availability of low-cost computational power is enabling the development of increasingly sophisticated cad software. Automation of design and manufacturing activities poses many difficult computational problems—significant among them is how to develop interactive systems that enable designers to explore and experiment with alternative ideas. As more downstream manufacturing activities are considered during the design phase, computational costs become problematic. Creating working software-based solutions requires a sophisticated allocation of computational resources in order to perform realistic design analyses and generate feedback. This paper presents our initial efforts to employ multiprocessor algorithms to recognize machining features from solid models of parts with large numbers of features and many geometric and topological entities. Our goal is to outline how improvements in computation time can be obtained by migrating existing software tools to multiprocessor architectures. An implementation of our approach is discussed.