Simulation has come a long way since it was generally adopted in Aerospace and A
utomotive industries in the 1970 s.
On the other hand, we still see archaic terminology such as card image when today s users may have never seen or used a card punch. Engineers are normally conservative and somewhat slow to change which is a good thing for the safety aspects of the products they design. But we live in an ever changing and accelerating technolog ical era. Today, simulation is used in every industry that designs and manufactures products from toothpaste tubes to rocket engines. The demand for engineers in the simulation field has never been higher. The advance of computing is relen tless. Today s mobile devices are more powerful and can store more information than the supercomputers of the early day s of simulation. The pace of computing continues to grow at an exponential rate even though a receding growth rate has been predicted many times. The only thing that is not changing is the basic physics behind the simulation computations. So where are we going with all of this advance in capability and demand? The level of detail in the simulation models continues to increase with fewer an d fewer assumptions required to get answers in a reasonable time. As the models become more complex the requirements for ass embling models, analysis of the results, and storing the volumes of input and output are increasing. Altair is w orking to bring the future of simulation to engineers in both an evolutionary and revolutionary way. We continue to moderniz e our tradition tools for ease of use, large model handling, and efficiency and at the same invent new ways of working for th e future generations of engineers. The challenge for the future is to make the complex simple by reducing the requi rements put on the user to get into the details unless necessary or desired. The simulation process can be more systemat ic and guided versus more of an art as it is sometimes today. Two engineers solving the same problem should be able to get similar results by establishing processes that are repeatable. More realistic representation of reality can be a chieved by stochastic analysis where the variation of real products is a standard part of the simulation process. Data an d processes can be shared within teams and across teams. Finally with advance in technology we will see a return to remote computation or as it is called today cloud computing which will include high speed 3D graphics. Altair is working in all of the directions described above to bring the best value and experience to the engineering community worldwide. In the document that follows, you will see elements of where we are going. But t he reality is there is a lot to learn and the knowledge you need to successfully apply simulation is quite vast. Good luck in your endeavors and we hope we can be of value to you now and throughout your career.