When we started in 2012 with our UberCloud Experiments taking engineers’ CAE applications to the cloud, each experiment took three months on average, and the failure rate was about 50%. Although the cloud ‘on-boarding’ process then was already well understood, the major and time-consuming hurdles were still unresolved. These hurdles included on-demand software licenses, multi-gigabyte data transfer, security concerns, lack of cloud expertise, and losing control over your assets in the cloud.
In 2015, based on our experience gained from the previous 100+ cloud experiments, we reached an important milestone when we introduced novel UberCloud software container technology based on Linux Docker containers and applied them to engineering CAE workflows. Use of these high-performance computing (HPC) containers by the cloud experiment teams dramatically improved and shortened experiment times to just a few days. Today, major cloud hurdles are well understood and have mostly been resolved, and access and use of cloud resources became as easy as in-house desktop systems.
Thanks to this progress, the average CAE cloud experiment now takes about three days, and the failure rate is 0%.
Our 5th annual compendium describes 13 selected technical computing applications in the HPC cloud. Like its predecessors, this year’s edition draws from a select group of projects undertaken as part of the UberCloud Experiment and sponsored again by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel and Digital Engineering. The Compendium is a way of sharing the cloud experiment results with the broader engineering community; it has just been released and is now available for DOWNLOAD.
In a recent article in Digital Engineering we have briefly summarized five CAE cloud experiments to demonstrate the power of cloud for engineering and scientific applications. All cloud experiments have been supported by UberCloud Professional Services experts.