Revive Your Legacy Design Tools to Accelerate Present-Day R&D

R&D departments often grapple with numerous in-house engineering design tools that get developed through the life-cycle of an industrial product. Each tool uses its own unique method for solving a specific design problem. Once archived, the design tool turns into legacy and only the original author knows its correct usage and limitation. As time passes, it becomes increasingly difficult to revive the tool. The organization fails to benefit from this invaluable legacy IP for its present-day R&D efforts.

Zeus Numerix faced a similar situation with respect to its legacy codes. Two decades of IP generation had resulted in design and analysis codes spread across multiple sectors, subjects and languages. Challenge was to bring them out of the archive and make them available for future growth. The traditional desktop approach faced hurdle due to ever-changing operating systems & related dependencies. Hence, we decided to exploit the latest web technologies for OS independent, browser-based execution of our legacy codes.

We adopted WebAssembly / Emscripten to compile our C/C++ scientific codes into low-level assembly-like binary format. The binary runs in all modern web browsers with near-native performance. For our Python-based design scripts, we used Pyodide to create a computing stack than runs in the browser using its Web APIs. This approach required surprisingly few changes to the original code. Hence, we get a single code that can be compiled for both desktop or web execution.

We created a single-page user interface for our web binaries using ReactJS JavaScript library. A local Apache server made the apps available to all our team members on internal LAN. This framework gave an out-of-the-box functionality for the web apps without any installation or configuration needs. Thus, we have been able to revive our legacy tools and greatly compress the learning curve on them. To experience this bold and forward-looking approach, you may check out https://labs.zeusnumerix.com, where restricted versions of our design apps are available free.

This easy to work web framework achieved following benefits for Zeus Numerix:

It transformed & brought life to the legacy design tools that were lying idle in archives.
It allowed us to showcase our suite of IP and design strengths to key stakeholders.
It promoted transparency & culture of collective innovation to facilitate the development of future technologies.

Please leave your Feedback on the Labs portal. For any specific query on a framework or an individual tool, please feel free to contact us at labs@zeusnumerix.com. We will be happy to assist with your key engineering design and analysis tools to make them future-ready.