Hi Phil, O.Tan and All,
I could not sleep last night and I thought a lot about how to share with you an excitement and potential of Cloud Simulation. I see your comment about why we need Cloud Simulation when current local solve works fine.
I’m a big fan of history mechanical engineering so please let me start with an analogy.

The picture above shows horse drawn carriage and one of first cars. It looked pretty similar and the value of first car was maybe not obvious. But it was a substantial technology shift that changed our civilization. You may say that it took cars decades to replace carriages, but the speed of changes is exponentially increasing and decades are shortened to years and soon maybe months.
There is another interesting point in the picture: first car was imitating the carriage. There is an inertia in design, a lot of components reuse. You can see similar mimicry in a first generation of simulation tools transitioning to Cloud. Typically they add a “Cloud solve” as an addition to “Local solve”. In Fusion we are taking step forward and we are creating technology that is primarily focused on helping users to take advantage of Cloud.

Our Solve dialog not only lists all studies that are ready for parallel computation, but also offers automatic creation of new studies that can be concurrently calculated. As a result users can understand multiple facets of the problem they are solving. But it is just a first baby step. Parallel power of Cloud together with Cloud data centric approach opens a lot of opportunities:
- Validation of you design as you are creating it
- Proposing variants that would fulfil the same design goal
- Searching past solution and offering a typical/best solution for combination of your loads and constraints. Maybe not only based on your past solutions: I can imagine creation of community of designers that would share their best practices in an “open source” form and create a real crowd sourcing platform for designers and engineers
- Cloud data could offer a ranking of your design based on simulation. Similar as Fitbit offers in data analysis tools based on millions of entries from their user base.
- Power of Cloud can help to generate a design based just on loads and supports definition (there was a nice demonstration of it on last Autodesk University
- Reverse engineering – using parallel threads of simulations to find what the part/assembly is good for
- Optimization
- Design of custom 3D printed composite materials and microstructures to exactly fit definition of your simulation
- Drop test: Parallel evaluation of multiple angles and positions of drop to find the worst case
- Etc.
We are living in the era of exciting technology shift in how we design and engineer our world. CAD is already making a path to Cloud and Simulation is in a very begging of its own path. Thanks for being on this journey with us, your active contributions on Fusion forum is helping the community a lot.
Have a nice Easter weekend,
Vasek