Sample ICS Service Engagements

Animation/Film
A Large Animation Studio switched exclusively to Qt from the Motif GUI toolkit. They made this switch to provide increased cross platform flexibility to support their applications on MacOS and Linux, while also maintaining the high performance benefits of C++. Their port to Qt was hindered by a lack of Qt functionality equivalent to the Motif EditTable widget. ICS facilitated this port by implementing an extensible and flexible Qt table widget, now productized as QicsTable.

Defense/Aerospace
BAE Systems is the fourth largest defense contractor in the world and a frequent consumer of ICS products and services. In this engagement, a BAE group required a high definition video to be displayed across a network at a high frame rate. This particular group was new to Qt and lacked the expertise to achieve the target frame rate. ICS helped BAE achieve its goals by creating an example program that combined Qt with freely available software.

Future Combat Systems (FCS) is the core of the US Army's modernization efforts to support a more modular and flexible force. The program consists of a family of manned and unmanned systems connected by a common network that provides the Army with the technology edge in future conflicts. The FCS Warfighter Machine Interface (WMI) of this broad program is being designed using a modified version of Qt Designer targeted at human-computer-interface (HCI) experts, instead of professional software developers. ICS has been involved with this project for over three years, providing specialized widgets and extensions to Qt to support this effort.

Financial
Black Forest Trading is a trading company where the ability to make split second decisions translates to the bottom line. In this case, the graphical user interface of one of their applications was performing slowly and ICS was engaged to investigate and recommend strategies that would provide the desired performance improvement. During this engagement, ICS discovered changes that could yield more than a 50% performance improvement in the user interface. ICS also identified various other bottlenecks in the user interface that could be designed around in a future version of the application.

A Wall Street Trading Firm asked ICS to work side-by-side with the principals of the company to develop a ground up trading application with live market feeds. This multi-year engagement leveraged ICS experience in building high performance applications driven by user-friendly graphical user interfaces. This application was completed in a fraction of the time and cost of similar applications deployed by larger firms.

Life Sciences
HEALTHCAREfirst has provided software and services to the Homecare and Hospice agencies since 1992. To better serve their customers, HEALTHCAREfirst turned to ICS to prototype a new user interface for an embedded device targeted at homebound healthcare patients. This device features a touch screen driven user interface designed to be easily used by non-technical, non-medical users. External deadlines required ICS to react quickly. From first discussions to finish, ICS was able to create the prototype in less than three weeks.

Med Man Simulations' Gas Man® software application is the training and simulation tool for Anesthesiologists all over the world. Medical students use it to train on the effect of various agents on patients, while professionals use it in simulation mode to select the optimal anesthesia for difficult situations. The last time the simulation algorithms were changed, the changes were the subject of Abstracts presented at national meetings. Luminaries (E.I. Eger, S. Shafer) other than the originator (J. Philip) have used Gas Man to teach many subtleties of anesthesia that could never be studied in patients. Gas Man was originally written in MFC and provided to the medical profession on both Windows and MacOS. Since the end-of-life of MFC on MacOS, there have not been any new MacOS versions. ICS rewrote Gas Man to use Qt and ported it to MacOS and Linux. During this effort, ICS also updated the user interface and made several improvements that made it more in line with the Mac application look and feel.

ViTAL Images is a leading provider of enterprise-wide advanced visualization and analysis software solutions for CT (computed tomography) and MR (magnetic resonance) image data. Their flagship application, Vitrea® was written in Qt version 2 and used Python as part of its build system. Market driven requirements for 64 bit support made it necessary to migrate their code base to a more recent version of Qt. To maximize developer productivity and application performance, ViTAL's engineering team selected Visual Studio 2005 with the Intel C++ 9.1 compiler suite. ICS ported this 1 million+ line application, with over 700 separate Qt project files, to this new development environment in a little over 4 months.

Semiconductor
Marvell® is an industry leader in storage, communications, and consumer silicon solutions. Their products can be found in an extensive array of digital consumer appliances and enterprise networks. ICS helped Marvell cinch an OEM deal by quickly porting an application that exercised a network device from MFC to Qt.

Texas Instruments (TI), a worldwide corporation with a semiconductor manufacture division, often ships quality assurance/test applications with their network device reference implementations to reduce time-to-market for its OEMs. This allows the OEMs to quickly determine if their implementation of the device complies with the device's specifications. Competitive pressures from other semiconductor manufactures are driving the delivery of these QA applications for platforms other than Windows (e.g. Linux and MacOS). One TI business unit decided to employ Qt to address this cross platform market requirement. ICS helped TI with this re-implementation by providing architectural and code review to guide them to use best practices. This relationship was consultative, with ICS providing expert technical resources on an ad hoc basis to address specific areas of concern.

Transportation
Union Switch & Signal (US&S) has set the pace for the industry in the development of reliable signaling and train control, wayside equipment, and relays for 125 years. A long term ICS customer, US&S originally built one of their software applications with ICS Motif GUI tools. US&S is now in the process of converting this Motif application to Qt to meet market demands for their products to support non-UNIX systems. US&S leveraged ICS's unique experience in both Motif and Qt to extend Qt with several Motif facilities that greatly reduced the effort required to port the application.

CAD
Flow Science is a leading supplier of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software and services. Its flagship product, FLOW-3D, is a powerful modeling tool that gives engineers valuable insight into many physical flow processes and is especially good at accurately predicting free surface flows. Flow Science engaged ICS to help them port their application from Qt 3 to Qt 4. In addition to the normal issues involved with porting an application to Qt 4, Flow Science wanted to continue simultaneous development on FLOW-3D while the port was underway. This required ICS's staff to develop a porting plan that minimized the effort required to merge the source code changes being produced by the two engineering teams. The final plan limited the divergence to less than a month by trading off the cost of multiple smaller merge points vs. the risk of large, complicated merges.

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