I think that overall there is definitely a visible movement of CAD and CAE towards cloud, which is opening the door to a better product design to more users. One of the main reasons why we at SimScale (https://www.simscale.com/) decided to build a cloud-based simulation platform were the barriers we saw, that were preventing simulation from becoming a standard tool in product design:

• Access: Both the hardware requirements as well as the licensing policies of traditional on-premise simulation software create a lot of overhead related to installation, maintenance, and update management. This additional IT administration overhead added by dedicated high-performance (HPC) hardware and complex license restrictions of the actual end-user software kept a lot of companies from using simulation.
• Cost: Dedicated hardware, software, as well as training for simulation can generate upfront costs of tens of thousand euros per simulation seat, sometimes even 6-digit investments before the first simulation can be started and its added-value proven.
• Know-how: Due to the large investment required to deploy traditional simulation tools, companies typically made sure to have a team of specialized experts to utilize these tools to their full potential. For this reason, simulation software vendors have continued to develop their tools specifically for experts. These tools are very powerful and complex, requiring physics, domain, and tool specific know-how from the user. As a result, a user who is starting with a traditional tool might need months of training before he or she is able to us the tool effectively.

Our goal at SimScale is to incorporate simulation into the standard engineering software stack by making it more accessible, cost-efficient (you pay only for the simulation capacity you need and can also use a fully free version for publi projects) and for everyone (no need to be a simulation expert).

-Agata

Hi Victor, thank you for the update.

~Victor

Caedium is a really unique and interesting CFD tool. Cloud computing and GPGPU definitely differs you from all other CFD software vendors.

I hope Caedium can get more and more users…

For our latest news on cloud-based (via Windows Azure) CFD simulation see http://www.symscape.com/news/hybrid-cfd-modeling-cloud-computing

Full disclosure: I’m sure you’ve noticed, but just in case – I represent Symscape the developer of Caedium.

I contend that most CAE will be cloud based in 10 years. In fact, I think most computing will be.

People who argue against CAE in the cloud generally offer 3 arguments: 1) IP security 2) Vendor lock-in 3) Performance.

I contend that the real issue in IP security is caused by all the unreliable humans. At worst, people are going to sell or steal IP. At best, people are going to be lazy about what they email or communicate to the rest of the world. That is happening today just as it will happen with a cloud based application.

Vendor lock-in is also a straw man. It’s not terribly common to be able to easily port engineering data from one CAD or CAE system to another today. Why should this be a strike against cloud based approaches? Also, if you look at the industries where a trend to the cloud is more established, you will often find that “data liberation” is considered an important selling point. “You own your data, and you can take it with you if you decide to leave.”

As for performance. I think that’s totally valid (today)… and the weakest of all arguments. I haven’t owned a laptop with a built-in telephone modem in many years. Seems like yesterday that every time I got on the internet, I was listening to 10 seconds of screeches, boops, and bops. It wasn’t that many years ago!

Ask yourself this. How much longer do you think there will be XBoxes, Wiis, and the like? If we get just one more generational advance in broadband internet speeds, and all that immersive gaming will be served in real time over the web. Now, THAT is computationally heavy. We’re not far away….