'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Abstract
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is widely used
in manufacturing and engineering from product design to testing.
CFD requires intensive computational power and typically
needs high performance computing to reduce potentially long
experimentation times. Dedicated high performance computing
systems are often expensive for small-to-medium enterprises
(SMEs). Cloud computing claims to enable low cost access
to high performance computing without the need for capital
investment. The CloudSME Simulation Platform aims to provide
a flexible and easy to use cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service
(PaaS) technology that can enable SMEs to realize the benefits
of high performance computing. Our Platform incorporates
workflow management and multi-cloud implementation across
various cloud resources. Here we present the components of
our technology and experiences in using it to create a cloudbased
version of the TransAT CFD software. Three case studies
favourably compare the performance of a local cluster and two
different clouds and demonstrate the viability of our cloud-based
approach