Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Wolfgang Gentzsch, President of UberCloud:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to UberCloud?
A: UberCloud provides ‘Cloud With One Click’ – a self-service, secure, on-demand, browser-based service for engineers and scientists to build, compute, and analyze their engineering simulations and complex workflows in the cloud. UberCloud is located in Los Altos, California, and works with customers large and small in the manufacturing, electronic design automation, life sciences, oil & gas, and financial industries, around the world, to speed up their productivity by 10x and more.
Q: How do you deliver computer aided engineering in the cloud?
A: Over the last 7 years we have built an engineering community around cloud computing, through our free UberCloud Experiments, so far resulting in 213 community projects and more than 100 case studies published. This community today consists of almost 5,000 CAE software providers, manufacturing companies, individual users, and cloud service providers. Based on the experience we gained together with our community, we have developed software technology which removes almost all hurdles to cloud computing. We enable our users to access their specific CAE workflows on any cloud, worldwide, through their browser, with one click, no learning needed.
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A: Our solution is based on the open-source software Docker from the San Francisco based company of the same name; industry-standard enterprise software container technology which we have enhanced over the past six years, adding on top more than 30 additional layers of complex features and functionalities for high-performance computing (HPC), into a full macro-service HPC container hosting the engineer’s CAE workflow and all additional tools she is used to work with on her own desktop workstation. These UberCloud Containers are what we call ‘packageable’ (package once, run anywhere), portable (across different Linux platforms), easily accessible (from anywhere, with one click), easy to use (like your workstation), lightweight (no performance loss across a growing number of compute nodes), scalable (in any multi-node multi-container environment), and many more, often doubling engineers’ productivity and reducing simulation time by 10x and more.
Q: What’s next for the world of computer-aided engineering?
A: Many 2019 industry predictions for manufacturing (including CAE) are talking about the wider and growing acceptance of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Industry 4.0, Digital Twins, 3D Printing, and Cloud Computing; no surprise, as this is a continuation of 2018. But behind all these trends and ‘techniques’ is one big common trend fueled by the engineers’ desire to make their complex and demanding tools and techniques more applicable, economical, user-friendly, intuitive, and automatic, to be finally used by every engineer. This broader trend is well-known as Democratization, including Appification, Containerization, and more. In our CAE community, we see this trend greatly supported by organizations like NAFEMS, COFES, ASSESS, Rev-Sim, and last but not least, by our UberCloud CAE container technology.
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Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: While our main focus currently is CAE, we already started stepping into electronic design automation, life sciences, oil & gas, and financial industries. And we also started moving into Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Industry 4.0, Digital Twins, and Personalized Healthcare, and even won several prestigious international awards already for the latter. Improving and enhancing our HPC container technology is our continuous task. Today we see engineers’ productivity boosts of 10x with existing customers, and very soon, based on our next-generation container technology, we will see productivity increases of 100x to 1000x, which we have already achieved within two of our UberCloud Experiment projects today, just google: ubercloud renumics deep learning.
