CAE Clouds with Silver Linings

Cloud computing is a buzzword that is thrown around by the media, promising much, and yet the approach is relatively rarely used by the engineering analysis community. As the articles in this issue show, access to HPC facilities brings many benefits, yet the cost and complexity of buying and operating an in-house HPC system limits that option to relatively few organisations, primarily the largest or those with public funding. So sharing the facilities, by using the cloud, seems the obvious solution.