Editor’s Pick: ESI Moves to the Cloud

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

If Shakespeare’s Richard III were a design engineer today, he might cry “Horsepower! My kingdom for horsepower!” If so, my Lord, today’s Pick of the Week is Catesby replying: “I’ll help you to horsepower.”

ESI Group, the developer of powerhouse virtual prototyping solutions for manufacturing, has entered the cloud with an engineering simulation system called ESI Cloud. It sounds cool.

ESI Cloud is a scalable high-performance computing service with three primary components: modeling, collaboration and cloud services. Besides the obvious like running computers and maintenance, cloud services means security services and analytics so that you can track usage data. Plus, synchronous and asynchronous collaboration runs throughout ESI Cloud where you want it.

Modeling has two prongs. One, ESI Cloud is a CFD (computational fluid dynamics) solution. Two, it’s an on-demand version of ESI’s multi-domain VPS (Virtual Performance Solution) system for crash, safety, comfort and NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) modeling. Take note: ESI Group says it plans to release “several more” solutions and industry-specific applications over time.

ESI Cloud’s CFD solution is based on OpenFOAM, and it goes from A to Z. It handles geometry import and cleaning, meshing, solving and results visualization. It has collaboration, project sharing and workflow management features. There’s automatic tetrahedral and hex-dominant meshing with boundary layer resolution. You can replay and reuse workflows, render large results and stream animations in your browser without a plug-in. That’s just some of it.

VPS on-demand should be terrific for handling peak loads and running very large models. Think large as something you’d run in parallel on 32 cores or more. That characteristic should have a positive effect on what you shell out on hardware and software to run large simulations. VPS on-demand enables real-time visualization of results and the simulation workflow interactivity you need, all through a Web browser.

ESI Cloud comes in tiered subscriptions for individuals and enterprises. A base subscription is no cost. This gets you 200 CPU hours, four cores per job, four simulations and 4GB storage for modeling, collaboration and visualization. That should be ample horsepower for many jobs and to determine how you can best weave ESI Cloud into your workflow. Hit the link at the end of today’s Pick of the Week write-up to go to ESI Cloud. Hit the “CFD Solutions” link then hit the “Plans” link to set up an account. Cool stuff.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Learn about the ESI Cloud here.