Update on cloud computing in engineering

The traditional engineers, technologists, and technicians – to be contrasted from computer scientists/programmers who sometimes like to take on these titles – are responsible for the design, synthesis, prototyping, and actually manufacturing virtually everything that can be touched by hand. Obviously, these professionals are at the core of human civilization. It is of interest to […]

The traditional engineers, technologists, and technicians – to be contrasted from computer scientists/programmers who sometimes like to take on these titles – are responsible for the design, synthesis, prototyping, and actually manufacturing virtually everything that can be touched by hand. Obviously, these professionals are at the core of human civilization. It is of interest to see how they exploit modern IT and ICT in their efforts to give us the best machines or processes. Of particular interest is cloud computing.
On a cursory look, cloud computing in engineering should be god-sent, a no-brainer, the holy grail of engineering analysis, as well as the low-hanging fruit of cost-reduction in the engineering analysis business.  After all, cloud computing promises seamless collaboration on engineering projects over diverse geographical regions on the globe. 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, with cloud computing, the whole of your enterprise all over the world can use the same versions of the analysis software tools at any point in time. Thus, the case for cloud computing in engineering analysis is quite compelling on technical and economic grounds.
There are barriers to widespread adoption of cloud computing in engineering. 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, are some of the “show stoppers.” Visualization, which is usually an integral part of engineering analysis, is hard to do online. Online visualization and/or animation approaches currently in use – 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.
There are several engineering disciplines – chemical, civil, electrical, electronic, mechanical and aerospace, nuclear, etc., to name a few, most of which can benefit significantly from cloud computing. For reasons of space, I will illustrate with mechanical and aerospace engineering. 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.
In an article on the current topic that appeared in this column on 7 October 2013, I did not emphasize the role that inadequate bandwidth plays in the adoption of cloud computing in engineering practice. However, more recent research results and opinion articles since then have suggested that the issue of bandwidth is indeed of major concern to many engineering enterprises that would have otherwise tried out cloud computing. Engineering analysis tends to be data-intensive. For example, when you simulate phenomena that depend on time, you may need to transfer data from the cloud to your desktop at every time step during analysis. Real-time visualization (on your desktop) of analysis results (computed on the cloud) involving massive data is infeasible because of the bandwidth requirement. Other concerns that engineers have with cloud computing include 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.
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 takeaway from this article is that the potential of cloud computing to revolutionize engineering analysis is still, in 2015, being tempered significantly by certain concerns, leading to a relatively sparse adoption of this technology paradigm in the innovation-driven and IP-sensitive engineering industries. Inadequate bandwidth required to seamlessly move data back-and-forth, fear of hacking, data theft, insiders sharing sensitive information, and general intellectual property mismanagement appear to be the main concerns.