Cloud Computing: The Brute Force Computing Revolution

Grazed from New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Autodesk just announced that it is selling design simulation software that works online, via servers in the company’s own data centers. This continues the design giant’s move into a lower-paying, hopefully higher-volume, world of mobile devices and cloud computing.

Just as important, it’s another sign that the cost of computing has fallen so far that it makes more sense to be wasteful with server power, and harvest the results, it than it is to plan everything carefully. It is a triumph of brute force and messes over carefully planned design…

“Simulation is the ability to understand something before you build it,” says Carl Bass, the chief executive of Autodesk. “If it doesn’t cost much to do it, why not do 10,000, even 100,000 different simulations of anything, rather than build a model, judge it, and keep going back to the drawing board?”

The idea is to try thousands of different conditions, like temperature, humidity, tensile strength or shape, in just a few seconds. Most of the outcomes will be lousy, a couple of them will probably affirm what a designer thought to begin with, and a few might have surprising insights no one had considered. The hope, Mr. Bass says, is that “we give an engineer a greater capacity to understand their product, before they make a million of them.”…

Read more from the source @ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/the-brute-force-computing-revolution/