This presentation was made at CAASE18, The Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering. CAASE18 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues.

Resource Abstract

The role of Simulation and Analysis (S&A) in the product development process (PDP) is of utmost importance. Through tremendous efforts, the computer aided engineering (CAE) community has established S&A for the PDP of critical components, however, the industry’s CAE subject matter experts still need to unleash the true value of S&A to the overall PDP. The state that the industry wants to achieve is termed as “democratization” of S&A and will integrate S&A into the PDP by providing simulation tools to the design community. The planned roadmap of this journey to democratization won’t be complete without re-visiting the existing CAE software licensing model. We believe to truly achieve this vision of S&A democratization, the passion of the CAE user community and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) need to go hand in hand to enable “commoditization” of software. With the maturity of high performance computing (HPC) in cloud computing, the hardware providers have already embraced the democratization vision and are driving full throttle with hardware technology advancements. The potential benefits of the hardware commoditization journey, however, are not being realized since progress has been governed by existing licensing models.
The CAE user’s community has realized the importance of commoditization of S&A resources to support the democratization vision. A step towards that, the businesses have provided CAE teams access to cloud HPC and embarked upon the journey of commoditization of CAE software licenses. We have explored many paths to democratization and in this presentation we will discuss the various options such as Open Source software, partnering with existing key ISVs, and collaboration with universities and research groups. We will also discuss the challenges we have faced and those we are still facing on our journey towards democratization.