This conference paper was submitted for presentation at the NAFEMS World Congress 2025, held in Salzburg, Austria from May 19–22, 2025.

Abstract

Engineering teams are leveraging cloud-native CAE tools to obtain faster insights from their product development and rapidly develop competitive products. Designers have access to robust end-to-end design, simulation and optimization tools in a web browser leading to the advent of the all-cloud engineering software stack. Many legacy solvers however, have not migrated or have been too slow to migrate to the cloud, slowing adoption and constraining their usage and benefit to engineers. The demand for high-performance, scalable, and easily accessible simulation tools is rapidly increasing. While established solvers such as Marc, an industry-standard for nonlinear and multiphysics simulations, offer powerful and mature capabilities for product manufacturers, their traditional desktop-based deployment often presents barriers related to hardware constraints, licensing complexity, and limited accessibility. To address these challenges, this paper explores the integration of traditional solvers into cloud-native simulation platforms, effectively unlocking trusted and advanced features for a broader audience of engineers worldwide. Cloud-native CAE infrastructure embraces the principles of containerization, microservices, and scalable compute resources, making it possible to deploy sophisticated solvers in a fully virtualized environment. This approach mitigates the need for specialized local hardware, reduces setup time, and simplifies access to extensive nonlinear analysis capabilities, including large deformation, contact, and material nonlinearity. The authors will demonstrate how traditional solvers can be rapidly deployed to the cloud highlighting the challenges of transitioning a legacy desktop application to a cloud-native ecosystem without compromising solver performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate how cloud-native deployment enables parallel and on-demand simulation, vastly improving the scalability and responsiveness of traditional solvers. This approach also facilitates organizational change where simulation experts become enablers for designers running complex physics cases with confidence and monitored through collaboration and SPDM features. An end user case study is presented that illustrates this successful deployment, showcasing enhanced simulation workflows for complex industrial applications in the automotive sector. These include scenarios such as nonlinear contacts in mechanical fastenings and connectors, high temperature / pressure gradient applications across components and coupled fluid-thermal-structural modeling. Additionally, the accessibility benefits of cloud deployment are emphasized, enabling collaborative, global usage without the need for expensive on-premises hardware or complex IT infrastructure. We show evidence where the cloud infrastructure has enabled engineers to run large-scale simulations more efficiently. The findings indicate that deploying legacy but powerful solvers like Marc through a cloud-native platform not only preserves their robust features and rich legacy but also democratizes access to high-end nonlinear analysis tools. This shift can empower a larger segment of the engineering community, promoting innovation and accelerating product development cycles.