Parasolid is the only kernel that is used in a high-end system. It has been the geometry engine for Unigraphics since 1989. Boeing uses Unigraphics in the design and manufacture of military jets, the C-17 transport aircraft, and Space Station Freedom. Both GE Aircraft Engines and Pratt & Whitney use Unigraphics in the design of advanced jet engines. General Motors has standardized its entire vehicle design process using Unigraphics and produces thousands of Parasolid models each day.

This 'feet to the fire' environment has enabled Parasolid to become the fastest, most robust, most reliable, kernel modeler available. It is what UGS calls Extreme Modeling that has made Parasolid highly sought after by leading engineering and manufacturing companies. Extreme Modeling describes Parasolid's ability to model, with confidence, the most complex parts. Either you have it or you don't, and you only get it by focusing year after year on the issues that demanding users set before you. Extreme Modeling is so important that many players in CAD/CAM including Solid Edge (while they were still part of Intergraph), MicroStation (Bentley Systems) and Virtual Gibbs (Gibbs & Associates) chose to change their core modeler to Parasolid to increase their competitiveness. "Many companies have upgraded to Parasolid because we make models our competitors cannot" comments Evan Knuttila, director of Parasolid Business Development. He is proud to point out that, "With now over 1 Million Parasolid-based users tackling real-world problems day-in and day-out, our Parasolid team has seen and solved many of the most difficult and varied modeling problems in the industry. This constant feedback and refinement loop, for well over a decade, has earned Parasolid its unrivalled reputation for performance, functionality, and reliability."

Extreme Modeling encompasses high performance in a broad range of technologies including:

• Complex blending: Parasolid provides a wide range of blending on complex geometry with unmatched reliability. Capabilities include rolling ball, variable- radius, face-face, cliff-edge, overlapping, curvature continuous, disc, conic-section, and conic hold line.
• Hollowing, shelling, offsetting and thickening of surfaces: These invaluable techniques create thin-walled parts. They are conceptually simple to the CAD user but the topological and geometric changes required are a rigorous test of a modeler's reliability.
• Tapering and parting line calculations: These operations primarily serve mold and die designers. Parasolid can apply a taper that follows complex parting lines. These capabilities and nonuniform scaling make Parasolid a powerful mold-design tool.
• Complex modeling using B-surfaces: Parasolid contains fully integrated B-curves and B-surfaces using industry standard NURBS. The kernel also simplifies geometry to analytic surfaces (planes, cylinders, cones, spheres, and tori) whenever possible to optimize reliability and performance. If more free-form construction techniques are required, NURBS of any shape can be arbitrarily trimmed to meet a designer's concept. Such surfaces can be sewn to construct a solid or a sheet model as required.
• Large model support: Models with tens of thousands of parts are not unheard of as computers become more capable and user interfaces enable greater productivity. Parts are no longer designed in isolation. The dimensions of one part depend upon the parts adjacent to it. If an overall dimension of an assembly changes, Parasolid has the capacity to adjust the dimensions of all the items in the assembly.
• Accuracy: Parasolid's default resolution is 10e-8 in a world size of 10e3. The accuracy ratio then is 10e11, which is an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE more accurate than any other kernel modeler's