Many users are looking at how to work more efficiently with their simulation data remotely, now that many are working from home due to the current COVID situation.
CAE simulations can generate a large amount of output data, and we have seen companies requesting engineers download simulation results off peak hours to keep their bandwidth reserved for the entire remote workforce during COVID, and so engineers are grappling with having to wait to bring results back to their workstations at home.
Remote visualization is one tool that can be used to enable engineers that are working from home to work more efficiently by:
Avoiding slow data transfer.
Engineers waste less time waiting on large simulation download results over their slow home connections from remote clusters or the cloud.
For example, with STAR-CCM+ perhaps you just need to make a quick mesh adjustment and resubmit the job to the HPC. Without remote visualization, you will download the 800GB file to your workstation, make a few clicks, and re-upload it to the HPC system.
View results immediately to make decisions faster.
Instead of downloading every result, it may be faster to view the resulting simulation to decide if you want to download it, some solvers enable the capability to view the simulation live, which you can use the visualization server to view the live results without waiting for the simulation to complete.
Make remote work less frustrating.
Remote visualization enables companies to support highly skilled engineers that may not live near the primary engineering center by facilitating remote work. Remote visualization also enables small remote branch engineering offices to utilize centralized HPC compute resources more effectively by avoiding data transfer for some tasks.
During the time of this writing, the COVID situation has made remote visualization a “must have” instead of a “nice to have”. Companies that invested in remote visualization were able to more seamlessly transition to a remote workforce that was required by the current pandemic.
Remote Visualization does not get rid of your workstation as the primary workhorse.
Note that Remote Visualization is not used to replace end user Windows CAE workstations, for many operations like fine meshing, CAD, and other tasks the zero latency of a workstation is important for productivity. Remote Visualization gives you new capabilities when working with remote data, and is designed to enhance, not replace a traditional workstation.