BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES

Cloud computing services, which allow users to lease time on remote computer systems, must be particularly attractive to smaller engineering organizations that use engineering simulation software. Such organizations have occasional need for substantial computing power but may lack the budget and in-house expertise to purchase and maintain such resources locally. The case study presented in this paper examines the potential benefits and practical challenges that a medium-sized manufacturing firm faced when attempting to leverage computing resources in a cloud computing environment to do model-based simulation. Results show substantial reductions in execution time for the problem of interest, but several socio-technical barriers exist that may hinder more widespread adoption of cloud computing within engineering. The term computational science refers to the application of computers for solving scientific problems, particularly the use of computer simulations to predict physical phenomena (Post & Votta, 2005). The term computational engineering, analogously, refers to the application of computers in solving engineering problems (Post, 2009). While there are many similarities between computational science and computational engineering, important differences also exist. Computational engineers use computers to do virtual prototyping, analyzing the behavior and failure modes of proposed designs through model-based simulations. Virtual prototyping has the potential to reduce both engineering DOI: 10.4018/joeuc.2011100103 32 Journal of Organizational and End User Computing, 23(4), 31-50, October-December 2011 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. development time and cost by reducing the amount of physical prototyping required to do a design validation, as well as opening up possibilities for design optimizations. Commercially available engineering packages put these simulation techniques within reach of the end-user engineer, although a high degree of domain expertise is required to set up and interpret the results of such simulations. Engineering simulations are extremely computationally intensive, with simulations taking anywhere from hours to days or weeks, depending on the type of simulation required. Many of these commercial engineering packages have support for running on high-performance computing (HPC) systems, and a survey of larger engineering firms indicates that such firms take advantage of HPC (Joseph et al., 2004). However, such systems are expensive to maintain and require additional IT expertise, rendering them inaccessible to many smaller engineering firms. In this paper, we describe a feasibility study undertaken by the authors to help determine whether the use of remote HPC resources for modeling-based simulation would have a positive return on investment for a small-tomedium-sized manufacturing company. This paper describes our experiences, including the benefits of reduced processing time, as well as practical challenges that we faced while supporting computational engineers in using remote HPC resources.