Faster Revit

[Tobie]

Is it possible to load 2 versions of Revit on my computer. One icon will load only from the laptop when I am away from the office and the other will use some or all the other computers in the office.
I should just buy more RAM, but i never seem to have enough.

[beegee]

Tobie,

Yes, you can have 2 versions running concurrently. 6.1 and 7.0 for example , are being used together by a lot of people.

[Tobie]

beegee,
I was actually trying to run 2 versions of Revit 7.0. One icon on my desktop will load only from my laptop when away from the office and the other icon can use RAM and processors from other computers when in the office and connected to the network.
Cheers,

[beegee]

You can run two versions of 7.0 together also.

Each icon would be pathed differently in your case, one to the network version and one to your standalone laptop license. You can't share RAM from other computers though. The program will use the RAM on the workstation that you have the icon on.

[Tobie]

beegee,
So i should just update my laptop RAM as there will be no real advantage in using only the other workstation.

[FK]

You can run Revit (or any program) on a different machine with some kind of a remote desktop. There is a bunch of programs for that.

Won't be as fast though.

[hand471037]

Just as an aside, and it's a little off-topic so bear with my editorial post here, but I'd love to see Revit get more distributed-process happy.

What I mean is that a lot of computers these days are multiple-core systems, i.e. Duals or HT-enabled processors. With Intel and AMD (and even IBM for Apple) announcing that they are all going to be releasing more multiple-core systems, it seems hardware is going that direction pretty strongly.

Also, within OS X today, and hopefully within Longhorn tomorrow, Grid computing is enabled. This means that processes that are aware of it or can benefit from it can use the collective power of all the machines in your office on a task. Now, many tasks, such as drawing in Revit can't really be distributed to multiple machines, but things like Rendering and Analysis sure can be.

Finally, more and more folks are becoming aware of and using the technologies FK is talking about that Unix folks have been enjoying for a while, namely being able to work on any machine that's connected to the internet at any time on demand, being able to 'drive' things 'headless' where apps can be run and told what to do purely from a command-line, and having things that allow for programs to automatically talk to each other.

Revit is, and remains, a primarily 'desktop' application. It's a really, really great product, but I'd love to see it 'grow up' and reach beyond the Desktop and into the future, where multiple cores and even machines will all be working together on demand, and it won't matter so much if you always have your laptop with you...

[Tobie]

thanks jef,
exactly what i wanted to hear.

[FK]

Parallelizing computation is very difficult. Even if your environment offers plenty of support, you have to spend a lot of time making sure parallel processes (threads) don't stomp on each other's data and generally play well together. You can end up hurting single-processor performance.

I'm not saying "never", just pointing out that it's not an easy request...

[hand471037]

FK, I totally understand that it's not going to happen soon and that it's a very difficult thing to do. Some things like Grid computing will be made much easier when it's supported at the OS level, such as it is in OS X. But it's still a huge undertaking.

I guess my larger point is that our little Revit is all grown up now, and has some significant hurdles in front of it in the future if it's going to ever be more than just a desktop application, but become *the* application of the AEC industry.

But just to contrast things: Blender, the open-source 3D package I use, can use multiple processors, can run on several different OSes, can utilize several different schemes for distributed processing (OS X's built-in Grid being the easiest, and render farming with custom ques and scheduling via custom Python the hardest), can be run 'headless' from the command line, contains a very robust API, and can be run remotely even via the most primitive CLI shell. And this is from a application that only a very few people are actually paid to develop.

So it's certainly possible, the real question is if Autodesk will devote the time and resources into making it possible, or focus it's efforts elseware.