The first commercial SDM platform was deployed into production on BMW's HPC on 19th December 2000. Virtual Insight, the platform for BMW's CAE Bench solution, had been developed by a visionary team at Silicon Graphics, the HPC provider. The Munich based SGI Professional Services team had decided to develop a technology framework to enable the development of domain solutions for HPC users. Virtual Insight was designed to enable the automation of dataset management; to assemble sets of data, transfer the data to the HPC and then collect and collate the results.

The idea was to reduce the data management overhead on simulation experts whilst providing traceability of
results, thus enabling analysts to submit more jobs on HPCs.