New era of simulation services for SMEs

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, personal computer has made big footprints to make this world better. Today, nobody can get any information without computer and network. At working places, at home and even at a resort, everyone is enjoying life with computers, with the Internet and the cyberspace to improve the working efficiencies. That is, a new generation of computing environment is just starting for all mankind to provide better services over the network, and it bears the ‘cloud computing’ concept. Computer aided engineering (CAE) was born ∼30 years ago, and today, so many fields are introducing CAE technologies to get better information, to produce objects with high efficiencies at low price. In foundries, so many CAE software packages are on sale in the world. Almost all of them include heat transfer analysis, fluid dynamics, structural analysis and microstructure morphology predictions, and more modelling methods are being developed by many researchers in the world. In respect that more foundries should introduce CAE technologies to their manufacturing field to jump up to the next technology level, e-business should be introduced into technology providing and supporting markets. Because of the expensive price of CAE tools, many small/medium sized enterprises are hesitating to try or introduce these technologies into their manufacturing field. To provide more helpful technologies based on CAEs, the authors developed and started new CAE services over the Internet. Everyone can enjoy CAE services through the Internet by a simple click. The user can download pre- and post-processors through the Internet, and then they can manipulate any operation using the downloaded application. All the solvers run at cluster computers behind the clouds. Therefore, users do not need to know how their jobs run, but they can carry out CAE jobs anywhere through the Internet.