ESI Group announced the launch of ESI Cloud: a reliable, scalable, multitenant and secure SaaS Platform designed to deliver advanced engineering simulation in the cloud, across multiple physics and engineering disciplines. Convenient and highly secure, ESI Cloud enables instant access to selected Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) solutions of ESI: from anywhere, at any time and providing elastic resources to fit varying simulation needs, from occasional use to peak loads. ESI Cloud is the only CAE cloud platform on the market that includes parallel workflows, templates and sample projects, which enable even novice users to become productive quickly.

Substantially lowering the cost of ownership and the need for in-house expertise, ESI's new portal is a significant step towards the democratization of Virtual Prototyping. First to be offered by ESI are an end-to-end CFD Solution, enabling effective use the open source software OpenFOAM, and on-demand use of ESI's Virtual Performance Solution. ESI Cloud's modeling capabilities are built entirely on an open service platform using the web technologies, providing the flexibility to introduce proprietary or open source geometry, meshing, physics solvers, or visualization engines.

The platform is able to deliver scalable High Performance Computing (HPC), has a multi-tenant architecture, an open application framework, enables real-time collaboration and provides browser based visualization, all with a high level of security. ESI Cloud uses the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, and the latest generation HPC equipment. ESI Cloud includes modules for modeling, collaboration and cloud services.

ESI Cloud's modeling capabilities cover the full chain of CAE processes, end-to-end, from geometry to meshing, multi-domain simulation, workflow and simulation management and results visualization. Collaboration aspects include real-time collaboration, as well as data, task and project sharing, with workflow management. ESI Cloud services provide advanced usage analytics and security.

The first software available on ESI Cloud is ESI's end-to-end solution Virtual Performance Solution (VPS). The solution enables industrial companies to evaluate and optimize product performance across multiple domains, so they can develop higher performance products at lower cost and in less time. By giving access to Virtual Performance Solution on-demand, ESI enables its customers to handle peak loads in the cloud and empowers companies of all sizes to run very large models in parallel (above 32 cores) in the cloud - obviating the need for initial hardware and software investments required for running large simulations.

The cloud-based version of VPS also enables real-time visualization of CAE results, enabling the full interactivity needed during the simulation workflow along with the ability to handle large data generated for 3D visualization in the browser.