Project Freewheel Team Members: Ben Cochran and Paul Cochrane

Autodesk Labs is our vehicle for getting feedback on technologies under development. Services, applications, and utilities actually originate in many parts of the company; however, Project Freewheel is one of our services that originated with the Autodesk Labs team itself. In this week's team member focus, I would like to highlight not one, but two Autodesk employees.

The Autodesk Labs Project Freewheel service is a combination of:

Two of the employees who make this happen are:

Software Architect, Ben Cochran, is the primary software architect for Freewheel.

• Ben designed and implemented the overall Freewheel architecture. He initially built the server side solution, including rendering services, load balancing, and distributed processing. He also built the fist version of the client side code, including user interaction and client server communication.
• According to Ben, the most exciting part of working with Autodesk Labs is working with smart people on innovative technologies to solve real user problems.
• Two interesting things about Ben are that he enjoys climbing to high snow covered peeks and riding motorcycles. (These are two separate activities. Ben does not ride at 90 mph atop a snow covered mountain.)

Manager - Security and Architecture Office, Paul Cochrane, is responsible for Freewheel hardware.

• Paul helped select the Project Freewheel hardware and share it on the network. Paul was also instrumental in acquiring the hardware for Autodesk Freewheel - the production version of the service. The Autodesk Freewheel hardware is monitored by the same team that monitors the hardware for Autodesk Buzzsaw and Constructware. The monitoring is done 24/7.
• Paul enjoys working with his team to protect the intellectual property of Autodesk by ensuring the security and integrity of our overall network via architecture and procedures.

Project Freewheel and Autodesk Freewheel are the results of many people's efforts. Ben and Paul are just two of the key players that make it happen. Viewing design data without the need to install additional software is alive in the lab.