These slides were presented at the NAFEMS World Congress 2025, held in Salzburg, Austria from May 19–22, 2025.

Abstract

The migration of legacy desktop CAE applications to modern web-based solutions represents a significant leap forward in engineering collaboration, data accessibility, and solution deployment. However, a key challenge in this transformation is balancing the benefits of modern web technologies with not only the security of data on the web but also the substantial investment required to fully migrate existing complex desktop applications built and hardened over sometimes decades. The first solutions to appear for remote CAE were remote-desktop approaches '“ running the legacy desktop application on the server and instead of rendering it on a local screen, streaming those pixels to a remote one. This technology requires no transformation or rewriting of the legacy desktop application, needs a limited investment to implement and almost instantly provides the full feature set of the legacy application. However, it does not take full advantage of the web'™s collaboration and sharing opportunities and does come with some caveats such as security issues, perfectible user experience, scalability and operational cost. At the other end of the scale, browser-based solutions '“ true web applications - that allow to visualize, share and analyze remote CAE result databases require a compelling investment to rebuild the legacy feature set and user experience. The reasons to engage in such a global change are to work around the drawbacks of remote desktops: enhance the end-user user experience through client-side rendering, mitigate security issues by ensuring only the active view data leaves the organization, ensure scalability and finally, considerably reduce the server cost by eliminating the need for GPUs. This paper presents a novel software service installed on the server side that aims at reducing the cost of moving any legacy desktop CAE application, by allowing the full reuse of the data processing layer of the application '“ the 'œapplication logic' '“ and then progressively streaming the visualization data it receives to any number of clients for in-browser rendering. Such an approach ensures the preservation of existing features and workflows that have been built, hardened and enhanced over sometimes decades. After a review of existing remote CAE solutions with a focus on remote-desktop approaches, this article delves into the new streaming service'™s architecture and describes its technical implementation. A closer look is taken at its interface with the application logic and other potential sources of CAE data, as well as how it efficiently conveys data to a remote WebGL engine for client-side rendering. Finally, a simple example showcases the flow of data and the reusability of an existing CAE application, providing a roadmap for organizations seeking to modernize their desktop products.