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

Abstract

Ongoing changes in SDM infrastructure—such as migrating entire installations or individual components to the cloud, containerising servers, adopting SaaS models, deploying distributed installations, and scaling containers on demand—are shaping modern SDM landscapes. CAE tools managed by an SDM system fall into two main categories. First, batch applications—primarily solvers—run in centrally managed HPC environments under a queuing system and require no manual intervention during execution. Second, interactive applications—especially pre- and post-processors and user scripts—run on local clients. Simulation engineers rely on a diverse, flexible mix of these tools in their daily work. Even in a cloud-based HPC environment the solver setup is largely uniform for all users. Client applications on laptops and workstations, however, remain a challenge: instead of being delivered through a centrally managed virtual desktop, they are often installed heterogeneously on each individual machine. Like other enterprise systems, modern SDM solutions are typically web-based. This avoids local client installations and simplifies collaboration with external partners. Advances in web-UI technology now let developers offer a genuine “desktop-like experience” in the browser. Nevertheless, familiar obstacles associated with locally installed client software persist—for example, a browser cannot directly modify files on a local disk, complicating flexible simulation workflows. A modern, open SDM platform that integrates local applications in a vendor-neutral, user-friendly way is therefore highly desirable. Ideally, it should make any cloud deployment of the SDM infrastructure completely transparent—essentially invisible—to the user. This presentation explores the relevant use cases, the challenges they pose, and practical solution approaches.