Cloud computing in engineering

Your company’s employees in South Korea, US, Scotland, and Nigeria can simultaneously login to the cloud and carry out an analysis on a computationally-intensive project that the employees are collaborating on, or they can undertake a “post-processing” of an already analyzed engineering problem. The various branches of your company, no matter where they are located […]

Your company’s employees in South Korea, US, Scotland, and Nigeria can simultaneously login to the cloud and carry out an analysis on a computationally-intensive project that the employees are collaborating on, or they can undertake a “post-processing” of an already analyzed engineering problem. The various branches of your company, no matter where they are located on the globe, can share a common pool of “elastic” computing infrastructure, computer network technicians and engineers; heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) facilities, and so on, all of which may be located in one physical building. Furthermore, the whole of your enterprise all over the world uses the same version of the analysis software at any point in time. Thus, the case for cloud computing in engineering analysis is quite strong, at least on technical and financial grounds.
To be sure, there are issues, such as security, data privacy, intellectual property (IP) violations, the management overhead associated with the humongous databases in SQL or MySQL, the overhead of moving large data back and forth on the Internet, with the attendant latency problems and bandwidth costs, and the need to sync parallelization procedures. Also, visualization, which is a big part of engineering analysis, is hard to do online. Present online visualization and/or animation approaches such as those based on Microsoft Silver Light, Adobe’s Flash technology, and WebGL are not well developed for the visualization tasks in engineering analysis. Moreover, there is significant vendor lock-in in this area of Internet technology. For example, Apple does not support Flash technology, and, while Chrome (Google) and Firefox (Mozilla) browsers support WebGL, Internet Explorer (Microsoft) does not.  Note that WebGL (Web Graphics Library) is a JavaScript application programming interface (API) designed and maintained by the non-profit Khronos Group, for rendering interactive 3D and 2D graphics within a web browser, without the use of plug-ins, and with full advantage taken of GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) acceleration. The Khronos consortium was started in early 2009, with participation from Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Opera. Thus, as far as high fidelity visualization is concerned, you will have to wait for better technology – improved WebGL or HTML5-capable browsers, perhaps.
Nevertheless, I am not sure that bandwidth or visualization-related issues represent the main barriers to the adoption of cloud computing in engineering analysis. I also do not believe that the problem is inertia cum conservatism, as some engineers have suggested.
There are several engineering disciplines – computer and electrical, electronic, chemical, civil, mechanical and aerospace, biological/biomedical, etc., to name a few, and all of them can benefit significantly from cloud computing. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on mechanical and aerospace engineering in this article. This branch of engineering designs, manufactures, and analyzes virtually all the mechanical systems known to man – your physical phone systems, all electric and electronic equipment, kitchen appliances, machines of all sorts, automobiles, aircraft, robots, HVAC/plumbing and piping systems, hospital equipment, and so on.
The real concerns with the adoption of cloud computing in engineering analysis appear to be intellectual property (IP) violation, fear of data loss, and cyber security. The IP and data loss issues are more relevant to commercial engineering industries, while governments and major defense contractors will in addition be very concerned with cyber security.  
The (online) trade magazine of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) published an article on cloud computing in mechanical engineering in November of 2011. The article illustrates the usefulness of cloud computing with the example of Autodesk’s Inventor Optimization (IO), a web-based simulation tool recently launched as part of Autodesk Cloud, which allows engineers to optimize their designs. The optimization involves changing the parameters of weight, cost, and safety for stress analysis of a product by working in parallel with other programs on a computer. At the same time, the analysts are able to simulate different design configurations in parallel by accessing the cloud. Bob Williams, the product marketing manager for Autodesk Simulation, is quoted in the article: “The problem has always been that simulations take a while to perform, so companies typically do two, three simulations in the development cycle for validation or product behavior prediction. While simulation is perfect for optimization, there just wasn’t time to do it.” Williams believes cloud computing will allow simulation users to move past simple validation of parts to their optimization, because the actual number-crunching can now be pushed to the cloud.
The ASME magazine article talks about “security woes” in the deployment of cloud computing in mechanical engineering: “many companies are wary of handing data to third parties, fearing hacking or accidental data loss due to server crashes.” The article goes on to say that “security was also the number-one concern of organizations mulling a move to the cloud, with more than half of respondents worried about malware outbreaks, hackers stealing their data, and insiders sharing sensitive information, according to the survey of 5,300 organizations carried out by Symantec.” The article contends that network security can be compromised and that nobody can guarantee that you can get your data back.
The main idea of this article is that while engineering industries and government research and application engineers recognize the enormous potential of cloud computing for their business, the adoption of this technology paradigm by this innovation-driven industry and government segment is almost non-existent. The fear of hacking, data theft, insiders sharing sensitive information, and general intellectual property mismanagement are the main concerns.