All,

I have not had to use this for Flow Simulation as I do not yet have Solidwork's Flow software but would love to try it out if I get a project that requires it. I have used Autodesk's CFD Flex and Simulation Mechanical Flex software in the past with great success and have recently moved over to Solidworks. I have a reasonably powerful workstation (4.25Ghz quad core, 32GB ram, Quadrok4000) But we are trying to run some non-linear, transient, no-penetration, high acceleration, hyper elastic material model simulations that was pushing the simulation well outside of the realm that my workstation could handle. So I tried to emulate the remote solve options that are in Autodesk's flex products on my own . In the Autodesk Software it allows you to hit a single button when ready to solve that will upload the model to an Autodesk Server on the cloud, mesh the model, and solve the simulation using their resources. Then just let you download the results when it's all solved. This way you could not only use a much more powerful server class computer to solve your results but it also allowed you to solve unlimited simultaneous simulations and still have full use of your workstation. It actually worked quite well for large simulations or simulations where you wanted to compare a large number of variations in either inputs or geometry in a small amount of time. Alas Solidworks didn't have this so I had to improvise. I have a network license for Solidworks Premium and Solidworks simulation Premium. What I did was set of the simulation on my workstation as I usually would. Do a pack and go on it. Then I created a spot instance on Amazon's EC2 service. (32core 2.5Ghz 256GB Ram) I installed a copy of Solidworks, and then used a VPN Tunnel to dial into my office and upload my network license to the EC2 Server that was running solidworks. Then I uploaded the pack and go from my workstation with the simulation all set up. Opened it and hit run. Keep in mind I am not using the view results options so it can solve in its own .exe outside of solidworks. This way I can not only run multiple simulations at the same time. Once they are all running, I can shut down solidworks, and check in my license back to my local network so I can use Solidworks on my workstation.

Maybe this option can help some of you guys solve the more resource thirsty simulations without having to build your own supercomputer. As the EC2 instances only cost $.25-$1.5 an hour to run depending on how big a machine you want and what time of day it is (the pricing is all bid/usage based. So make sure you put in a significantly high bid otherwise they'll shut down your server if you get outbid and loose all the data that is on it). So far it has worked out really well for us. Maybe Solidworks could take a look at this process/model and create a little GUI/integration within Solidworks Simulation that automatically sets this up for customers who don't have coworkers like mine that are total IT nerds and give them a quick, easy, and dirty way to compete with Autodesk's Simulation Flex offerings without really having to build any back end because Amazon already has done it with EC2.

Regards,

Grant