Project Centaur is a simple structural optimization tool that allows users to setup a very simple Factor of Safety simulation and solver the multiple iterations in “the cloud”. So, the setup is super, super simple.. The interface takes advantage of the slick Inventor 2011 UI, which has one of the more simplified UI for simulation I have ever seen. The slick part is that you simply just hit “optimize” and it packages up the necessary data, solves it, gives you some feedback and then you get a message that the results are ready to go.

Project Cumulus is similar but it focuses on plastic injection parts ala Moldflow. The demo I saw ran a design of experiments simulation that ran a variety of models and presented the optimal solution.

The most amazing thing was that they are using Amazon as the service provider. This is the most exciting point of all. Historically, Amazon had great scaling, but the specs on the individual hardware never really cut it for engineering simulation. But, times are changing. The fact that engineering vendors can access computing power in a traditional commercial environment is awesome! Really awesome.. Total game changer when it comes to cloud computing in the CAE space.

For many engineers that are leveraging simulation to drive design- more is better. Meaning, the ability to run multiple what-if scenarios is critical. This is potentially a new trend or at least the non-typical direction that many take when viewing the “cloud” for simulation. Personally, I think its spot-on.

Historically, many view the cloud with regards to simulation to leverage clusters to solve massively large simulations. This is the typical view in the HPC market.

Neither one of the above Autodesk projects is geared to leveraging parallel computing. Both examples I saw ran numerous simulations in parallel, but each simulation leveraged a single core or at least a single machine.

While, I think this is great and very excited to see design driven simulation in the cloud. The devil is in the details of how this will be packaged and delivered. How will users gain access to the machines, how will they manage the machines in the cloud? Not impossible, but managing and scheduling jobs is non-trivial. Especially if the cloud is elastic where use will fluctuate.

I’m sure the smart people out there have this dialed in, anxious to see the results.

What’s the benefit to us as a user?

1. Pay as you go/pay for what you need model. Allows for flexibility on making a capital investment for a piece of technology that is yet to be proven valuable and that is used only some of the time.
2. Near instant fixes to “problems”. No need to update software or download anymore, its just there and it works.
3. Access to software from anywhere, from any device on any platform. Freedom to choose what you want, not being dictated what to use by others.

I could go on forever, but even the short list above seems valuable. But the interesting concept is the name “Software as a Service (SaaS)”. I have been thinking about this one lately, what is the “service”? Access to the software? The fact that the software is more accessible, is that really a service?

What if vendors truly provided a “service” along with the software? Instant chatting, file sharing, file storage, project work, implementation, training, additional computing power,  real engineering help all via the web? Now things could get interesting. Imagine having the “platinum” package and you have access to a support infrastructure “on-demand”.

Suppose you are in the midst of an engineering project and you want to create a really slick rendering for a proposal, but you never quite got the rendering stuff or better yet, you don’t have access to it with your license. You could log into “the site”, your model is already there and chat with the “service” team and you guys spec it out really quickly what I want. The turn around time could be anywhere from minutes, to hours to over night. Why? The web enables and promotes efficiency. The vendors will have to think this through well enough to be able to support it, but their “services” company can easily be around the clock, around the world. The models are already “up there”. Now its just getting the specifics. Especially if you have a “services” contract built into the cost of the well, service?

Think of how this scales out to automation of processes, SIMULATION, design help, the list is endless. I’d be interested to hear people talk about the service side of it and worry less about the software. At the end of the day, do we want to engineer or do we want to drive software?

Google is hitting the nail square on the head with Chrome OS or Chromium or whatever they want to call it. Here is an explanation..

I tend to mix cloud computing and SaaS as one in the same. But really, I see SaaS as the business side of things – how you access and pay for the software application. Cloud computing is a bit more general and simply means (to me) leveraging the web and hosted servers/sites to perform what you do (or wish you could do) locally today.

There are so many avenues that this can take on the CAD side. I suspect that as bandwidth is increasing, we can imagine that you will be able to interact, edit and create 3D models over the web. But, I am not sure from a user’s experience this is in the near future. Tons of things have to be accounted for including RAM, video performance and overall processing power for complex CAD operations. Plus, one of the selling points of SaaS is to use it on demand, “when” you need it. This has a very part-time, occasional feeling about it. Even though CAD is easier to use now than ever before, its not word processing, so there will be a need for proficiency.

But, as we know, there are many facets to the CAD world. To me, the first logical step is data collaboration – files in the sky, on demand access from anywhere that can be viewed, mocked up and shared. Reducing the need for ftp, email and time draining “quick” design reviews. PTC is just dipping their toe in the water with their Social Product Development effort. So imagine you are collaborating with another site or a vendor or a supplier and you can all have access to the exact same CAD data on demand. You can collaborate on the spot or leave text or even video messages for each other so that time zones become less and less of a burden. This access needs to be anywhere, from any device. All the data – 2d drawings, FEA/CFD results, testing data, specs, BOMS -everything must be a click away. Some might be thinking, doesn’t this already exist in PLM?? To a point, but it is still not mainstream enough to roll out to everyone. Once this is accomplished, then I think we will see the true power of cloud computing on this sector of the industry.

The next and more true to my heart is on the computation/simulation side of the world. FEA/CFD is becoming more and more mainstream. Sizes of models is increasing daily as well as the complexity of the physics being solved. This growth will not slow down and will always be bottle necked by the computing resources available. Many have tried and have been marginally successful in providing “on demand computing”. This will continue to be a theme from the simulation folks. So you can imagine that you may run CFD from time to time, but really don’t want to maintain the computing power needed. You may run conceptual models locally and leave the big jobs to the cloud. No doubt we will see more and more of this. But how we interact with this environment is key.

If I sit at my desk and setup a model and then submit all the files etc needed to run the simulation to some server in the sky, this will take time. I also will want to interact with these models in some form or another. At a minimum, I want to know the progress, check quickly if things are moving along nicely, check preliminary results and a whole list of little subtle things that I check when running locally. The beauty of a cloud model is that I want to check that from anywhere at anytime. Might seem silly, but be nice if I had an iphone app that allowed me to see what jobs I had running and have a little dashboard that is customizable to look at certain things that “I” want to look at for all my models. Maybe I’m not an iphone guy and I simply want a text message or instant message when the model is finished. Maybe I am not a mobile device guy at all and simply want to “login” on my wife’s home computer to see how things are going. To many this might be a foreign concept and many others are probably nodding their heads because they are feeling the pain.

I am closer to the simulation folks, so I could go on for days about the potential of SaaS/cloud in this space. I am interested in hearing from true CAD folks that are struggling everyday. Where can the cloud help you?