Autodesk Simulation CFD

[#1]

In the interest of making products suited to our users' needs I'm curious how many simulation users are running or monitoring simulations from home.

Do you run or monitor simulations from home or outside of work? When and how often? To what extent? How -- email/text notifications, take laptop home, remote desktop, etc?

Thanks!

Ryan Arnaudin

User Experience Designer

Digital Simulation
Autodesk, Inc.

[#2]

For our users that monitor this forum, please give Ryan as much information as possible.  This is your chance to help drive product design!

[#3]

Yes I do. RUN, not monitor.

Simulation MP 2012 - Static and MES; some thermal

Use a takehome Dell M6400

What else do you need to know Ryan?

[#4]

How often do you take the laptop home to run simulations? What situations require you to run simulations at home (e.g. too many to get done during the day, need to keep an eye on them while they are running, etc.)?

Do you find anything particularly painful with the process?

Thanks,

Ryan

[#5]

I queue up a lot of simulations to run over-night and over weekends on my work computer. Because of that, I tend to monitor convergence and results from my home computer. I have to VPN to my work network and then remote-desktop to my work-station. There have been times when the solver has unexpectedly quit or has an error and having the ability to remotely monitor has saved time. If this process could be streamlined, it would be more helpful. 

Is there anything else you would like to know? 

[#6]

This is great information; thanks for the replies.

I'd love to hear if others are doing the same, or something different.

Ryan Arnaudin

User Experience Designer

Digital Simulation
Autodesk, Inc.

[#7]

I rarely ever need to run/monitor solutions while I’m traveling but when I do it is super valuable. 

Anything that would make it easier to monitor and dispatch results for viewing would be welcome.

Maybe add an option to email a compressed results file to the progress notifications portal?

[#8]

Ryan -

I am in favor of remote notifications and control.  Our IT policies are quite restrictive so VPNs, remote desktop sessions, etc. are rarely used, though I would if I could.  We don't do analysis on laptops either.  But anything that can be done over email would be helpful, I guess.  It doesn't happen all the time but when I do it seems to come in bursts, and when I have an analysis on a deadline it always seems like I spend the day getting the setup right and wish I could leave rather than having to monitor the simulations at the end of the day. To date I haven't used the email notification but that's because just knowing what happened isn't enough, I don't have any way to fix things if they arent working as expected.

Not sure exactly what I'm suggesting but the ability to do some basic commands like start/stop/run for so many iterations/skip to the next analysis in the queue would be pretty neat over email.  Of course, this would mean getting some convergence or summary results sent in addition to just a message saying analysis finished successfully.  Preferably there would be some way to protect & authenticate this info too, like a password-protected zip file, or signed emails, or some such.  I'm sure getting a VPN in place to run remote desktop securely would be the best, I guess.  Hope this helps.

Nick

[#9]

Thanks John and Nick. It's great to hear what the different needs are for different work situations.

[#10]

Excellent feedback, Nick.

Granted there are many avenues we could take for the final user client, such as email, web client, smart phone app, or light desktop app for a home PC.

You mention times when there are bursts of activities. Would it make the most sense to aggregate notifications, to avoid too many emails all coming in at once? 

Consider a typical busy period, where most of your analyses run smoothly, but a couple need refinement, and a couple fail outright. What would you want to tackle first? What minimal amount of information would be useful from each type of case?

Thanks all for your feedback,

Pete

User Experience Designer

Autodesk Simulation