NX CAE Symposium Day 2 – Keynote and Panel Discussion

Following is another blog post from Mark, on Day 2 of the NX CAE Symposium.

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The Symposium kicked off today with a customer key note by Kendra Short of Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) entitled ‘Mars Science Laboratory.’  Kendra delighted the group with an insightful overview of the challenges and unique solutions employed by JPL in making Mars exploration, as well as the recovery and analysis of scientific specimens possible. She shared pictures of the latest rover, named ‘Curiosity’ undergoing a variety of validation tests prior to its scheduled launch date on Nov 25^th.  [Picture of Curiosity undergoing thermal testing below]

CAE veteran, Dennis Nagy chaired a thought-stimulating panel discussion just before lunch.  One of the hot subjects that surfaced was the influence of parallelization and cloud computing on CAE productivity.  Kendra Short of JPL highlighted how analysts are often unable to fully evaluate the parameter trade space during concept studies, due to limitations in computational capacity.  Charles Macdonald of Hendrick Motorsports noted that fee-based, third party cloud services may fit better with the business models of certain organizations.  Steven Mueller commented that in the context of high performance computing, the larger challenge is addressing solver license cost, rather than CPU hardware cost.  Doug Wenk of Siemens PLM sees cloud and high performance computing as a key enabler for CAE-based optimization efforts. [Picture of Dennis and panel members below]

Mark