This presentation was made at CAASE18, The Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering. CAASE18 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues.

Resource Abstract

This training course provides a pragmatic step-by-step introduction into cloud computing for CAE applications. While similar courses in the past often provided introductions mainly for advanced early adopters, this short course has been especially developed for the majority of engineers. Following recent findings and suggestions from market analysts like Gartner and Hyperion/IDC we believe that now is the time to add cloud computing as an additional computing tool to your in-house resources because, over the last two years, cloud computing for CAE applications has been greatly simplified, previously insurmountable cloud hurdles removed, and the cost of using cloud resources successively reduced because of healthy competition in the high performance cloud computing market.

The benefits for small and medium size manufacturers of running CAE applications on high performance computing (HPC) resources are widely acknowledged in the meantime: such as developing better quality products; achieving high return on investment (ROI); reducing product failure early in design; and shorter time to market; leading to increased competitiveness and innovation.

Why then are many engineers running simulations still just on their workstations, although more than half of the engineers (according to the US Council of Competitiveness) are regularly limited by the performance of their workstations? The main reason is that in-house HPC servers are often coming with high investments and maintenance cost, and long and painful procurement and approval processes. And for many, Return on Investment (ROI) from HPC is not clear, although it is expected to be huge according to an IDC study on ROI in HPC.
The second alternative for manufacturers to experience the benefits of HPC, without having to buy and operate their own HPC system, is offered by cloud computing. CAE in the Cloud enables engineers to both continue using their workstation or in-house servers for daily design and development, and to submit larger, complex, time-consuming jobs to the cloud. Major benefits of the CAE Cloud solution are on-demand access to ‘infinite’ resources, pay per use, reduced capital expenditure, greater R&D and business agility, and dynamically scaling resources up and down as needed.

This training course will begin with a discussion of today’s benefits and challenges of cloud computing for CAE simulations. We will look at the cost for using in-house versus cloud resources, compare cloud licensing models from different software providers, discuss ‘hot topics’ like trust and security, data transfer, and access to cloud resources, and briefly describe the (currently) most popular model of Hybrid HPC.

The last part of the training will take participants hands-on to the cloud. We will provide real-time instant access to simulation codes like ANSYS Fluent and Mechanical, COMSOL Multiphysics, Dassault Systemes’ Abaqus, Numeca FINE/Marine and FINE/Turbo, Siemens STAR-CCM+, Transvalor FORGE, and OpenFOAM, with ready-made examples which participants can run in the cloud.