State of Computational Whitepaper for the Scientific Computing World

Engineering Reaches for the Cloud

The use of computational engineering is set for strong growth over the next five years, along with the number of engineering applications using computing – and the use of the cloud is burgeoning.

That is the forecast predicted by the recent 2022 State of Computational Engineering Report, recently published by Rescale. 

The report, based on a survey of 233 engineers, scientists, and high performance computing professionals, identified three key trends. Firstly, that organizations are aggressively using computing to explore new product possibilities; secondly, that engineering teams with easy access to compute are far more likely to have successful projects; and thirdly, for many organizations, that HPC automation plays a central role in their research and development transformation strategy. 

Furthermore, an increased use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in product development is requiring ever-increasing computing power. 

It has to be said that, in some ways, engineering is lagging behind in its digital transformation compared to other industries including commerce, media, and sales/marketing. While computer-aided design and computer-aided engineering have been commonplace for decades, computational science and engineering – which adds high performance computing (HPC) for breakthrough speed in highfidelity simulations, enabling the mainstream adoption of data and computationally intensive methods – is still in relative infancy. 

However, that situation is changing fast, with computational engineering being used in all industries to varying degrees. 

Some 82 per cent of respondents to the survey predicted the use of computational engineering would ‘somewhat increase’ or ‘increase significantly’ in the next five years, while 69 per cent expected an increase in the number of engineering applications used.