The relatively new and rapidly growing cloud market makes it difficult for engineers to choose the right CAE cloud provider. This paper covers basic cloud concepts for running CAE simulations.
We have selected several use cases in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics and Computational Structural Mechanics, including solvers from leading software vendors. These use cases are bundled in a state-of-the-art benchmark suite.
Different resource providers including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and on-demand High Performance Computing cloud services like CPU 24/7 are benchmarked.
Important criteria are the underlying cloud system, bottlenecks (data transfer, network interconnection, licenses, etc.), security policies and offered support models.
The benchmarks have shown that ready-to-run services are beneficial in terms of usability, license integration, support and optimized hardware platform. Virtualized cloud solutions offer a high degree of freedom, but require a more sophisticated knowledge from the CAE engineer.