Data Management in Engineering Simulations

disc-hanging
As we noted in an earlier blog post about our Cloning feature (https://rescale.com/blog/cloning-on-rescale/), engineers and scientists spend significant time managing their simulation data. This is a problem because it interrupts their focus on product development and hinders progress in creating the best conceptual, preliminary, and detailed designs possible.
At its core, building great products requires a tremendous amount of iterations. Today, a major trend is that this iteration process is happening much earlier in the product development cycle. This is largely attributed to the ever-increasing adoption of simulation and other computer-aided analyses.
As simulations get more complex, input and output files are getting larger (at Rescale, we have dealt with customer output files larger than 100GB). In addition, there are now more files needed per simulation. Even if we isolate a single engineering project, it involves multiple iterations of analyses. A single run contains at least one input file, along with many custom scripts and add-on files. On top of this, different versions of the input files exist separately in order to track various changes. Finally, multiple analyses result in multiple output files. Add this to the need to share files between colleagues, or even the need to make copies of these files to run derivative analyses, and it can get complicated quickly. So much data exists, and a great deal of it is redundant or unnecessary. All this equates to engineers and scientists wasting precious time looking through this ever-growing mountain of data.
At Rescale, we recognize the seriousness of this problem, and have designed solutions to address the issue. At the base level, we provision low-cost cloud storage to our customers. Beyond that, our Clone and Share features eliminate the need for engineers and scientists to (a) find the necessary files, (b) associate those files with the correct analysis, (c) transfer those files either to another folder or to a colleague’s folder, and (d) ensure that  transferred files are the correct version. This saves time and effort – resulting in more time spent solving real engineering and scientific problems.
We continue to work towards finding the best solutions to this pressing problem. To learn more about Rescale, please visit, www.rescale.com.  To learn more about how you can reduce the time you spend managing your data, please contact us at info@rescale.com.

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