What Is NAFEMS ASSESS, and Why You Need to Know
Joe Walsh, the leader and driving force behind the NAFEMS ASSESS Initiative, joins CIQ in this week's webcast. The ASSESS Initiative began in 2014 bringing together experts across many industries to tackle issues slowing wide adoption of high performance simulation. Join us as we discuss the ASSESS Initiative, some of the issues it is tackling, and why CIQ supports the effort.
Webinar Synopsis:
Speakers:
Note: This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors.
Full Webinar Transcript:
Brock Taylor:
At CIQ, we're focused on powering the next generation of software infrastructure, leveraging the capabilities of cloud, hyperscale and high performance computing. Welcome to this week's CIQ webcast. I'm Brock Taylor, vice President of High Performance Computing, subbing in for Zane Hamilton. Today we're going to talk about some of the challenges that the digital manufacturing community is facing in adopting advanced simulation technologies. And I'm excited to bring in our special guest for this discussion, Mr. Joe Walsh, who is the founder and CEO of IntrinSIM. And he leads the ASSESS initiative, which is an effort to address some of those challenges faced in broadening the use of simulation. So, Joe, welcome. It's really good to see you, my friend.
Joe Walsh:
Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.
What is the ASSESS Initiative? [5:50]
Brock Taylor:
Yeah. So first off not everyone who's watching this is going to know what the ASSESS initiative is. So can you tell them more about its history, starting with assesses an acronym. So what does it stand
Joe Walsh:
For? Yes, I'd be happy to do that. So ASSESS stands for Analysis, Simulation and Systems Engineering Software Strategies and ASSESS was formed to bring together the key people in the simulation space from several different aspects, from all different industries to understand how we can work together to significantly increase the use and value of engineering simulation. So ASSESS got started in 2014 when we were at a Congress, and I was describing to people in the presentation how the role of engineering simulation was changing up until that point in time, except for 2008 and 2009, the simulation market had grown 10 to 15% per year. I was involved in it in 1978 when there were maybe 300 or 400 people. By this time, there's hundreds of thousands of people involved with this. So one of the comments was the 2008, 2009 economic meltdown of the world created a situation where everybody had to figure out how to be more competitive on a worldwide basis.
Everybody had already used lean manufacturing, so there wasn't that much more to be squeezed out of manufacturing processes. So then the question was, how do we understand, how do we reduce cost? How do we improve innovation? How do we reduce warranties? How do we make better products faster? And that all came down to understanding product performance. And the only way to do that is through simulation. You can measure it through tests. You can only understand it through simulation. So what that did is that created this pending demand for engineering simulation. And that pending demand creates an opportunity for a massive inflection point of the industry. We are beginning to see that taking effect. We have continued since that time to have 10 to 15% growth except for 2020 because of covid. But even then we had 4% growth when the rest of the engineering space is contracting by 15%. But that's still not hit the real inflection point yet. It's getting better, but there's an opportunity there for this market to totally explode in application. And the issue is that the expertise required is too high. If I'm going to run CFD analysis, I need a PhD with five years experience. There aren't enough of them. And so the big effort with ASSESS is how do we make this more accessible and more valuable to a broader audience so we can fight that expertise barrier?
What is NAFEMS? [9:10]
Brock Taylor:
That that statement really drew me in when I first found out about ASSESS, because that's that very statement in the context of the system side of what a high performance computing cluster or a very complex HPC solution has, in terms of expertise of people who can deploy, who can run and actually effectively use that system. And that's the ASSESS initiative's mission and things that I have been working on with groups of people over the years. And in part why I'm at CIQ is we are looking at this type of problem from the system side and trying to make it easier for people to employ these highly complex solutions that run the simulation applications. And it's been fascinating just in the past couple years being engaged with you, being engaged with the ASSESS community at the problems that this community is actually trying to solve. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes. But I wanted to bring up what I see as a pretty big validation point of what you're doing. And that was last year the NAFEMS organization acquired the ASSESS initiative. So again, for those on the call that don't know what NAFEMS is, can you start with telling us a little bit about NAFEMS and some of the interactions and benefits that are going to come about from this merging of the two organizations?
Joe Walsh:
NAFEMS has been around for decades and is the premier independent organization for best practices, in validation of engineering simulation activities. NAFEMS actually stands for the National Association of Fine Element Methods. And it was initially a UK based organization, but the UK went ahead and started that and tried to organize that. And very quickly the rest of the world wanted to get involved and they become an international organization, but they kept the name, although the acronym doesn't mean anything anymore except for recognition.
So they've been focusing on training, best practices, certifications, everything it takes to do simulation really well. ASSESS has been collaborating with NAFEMS for years. And with our whole idea of being involved, okay, here's the organization that's making sure that when you do simulation, you do it very well. And ASSESS is focusing on how do we make that happen at a much grander scale? How do we take it to the next level? So the ASSESS initiative is all about thought leadership. It's all about how do we put things together where we can change how people think about it, and how they can take better advantage of it. And NAFEMS is about best practices and we've collaborated on multiple events and there's always crossover. And at one point, Tim Morris, the CEO of NAFEMS came to me and said it makes sense if NAFEMS can cover everything from thought leadership through to implementation. And that's what the integration of the ASSESS initiative inside NAFEMS is. So NAFEMS is still the premier independent organization about anything related to engineering simulation. The ASSESS initiative is one track inside NAFEMS that focuses on thought leadership and where we want to go next. And the rest of NAFEMS focuses on best practices of what to do today.
Brock Taylor:
I remember when I read the press announcement, I was thinking that that makes perfect sense, right? It's definitely a very symbiotic approach. And as you said NAFEMS provides training and with this mission of expanding the people who are able to use advanced simulation in their work. I say digital manufacturing, it's probably too narrow of the definition of the number of people that can use simulation. NAFEMS provides a way to bring in and expand that user base. It to me I was like I was nodding my head and thinking, man, Joe's had one heck of a year.
Joe Walsh:
It has been one heck of a year, Brock. Yeah. And it's also good recognition to have an organization as established and as well-recognized and as credible as NAFEMS to actually partner up and bring in ASSESS is a key part of their future. And so it's an honor as well.
What is the ASSESS Congress? [13:59]
Brock Taylor:
Yeah. Well we met face-to-face for the first time last year when I attended my first assessed Congress. And I remember at the beginning of that, when I introduced myself, you pulled me inside and said, just soak this in. Some element of just soak it in. And, and I didn't quite know the full scope of what you meant until the end of the first day of the Congress. It was almost overwhelming. But in a good way, in a great way. We'll come back to the moment that in a moment. But tell people what the ASSESS Congress is about. Give them context of some of these issues that you're trying to drive resolution.
Joe Walsh:
The ASSESS Congress is where we bring together the real thought leaders of the industry. And we have a very interactive session. It's not like any other conference that's ever been put on. We actually have very proactive working sessions where everyone has to work together in private groups. But the key thing about ASSESS Congress is that the attendees, 75% of the attendees are director level or higher. These are strategic open discussions. These are where we have discussions between significant end user customers, government employees, and academia and multiple software vendors in this space. All talking about the same issue. We have competitive software vendors having open discussions over dinner together about how to address particular aspects. And this Congress has been the key to how we bring everyone together to collect their thoughts. The environment that we created with this Congress is one of complete openness of complete, everything gets left behind the door.
There are no egos because every person, if you're qualified to be at this Congress, you are qualified. It's as simple as that. And so that they're very productive, open discussions amongst brilliant people. And it's the top people in the world on this subject matter in one room together. It's a small activity. Last year we were about 55 people. This year we're looking at about 60 people. The largest it's ever been is 85 people. We purposely cap it at a hundred. And so the intent is to keep it small and intimate. The anecdote is, the very first one we did was a summit where we limited it to 40 people. When we finished that summit, we actually asked the 40 people, should we set up an annual congress like this. And resoundingly we got 38 no's and two yeses. The two yeses were the two organizers, me and another person. So we waited six months and did it anyway.
Brock Taylor:
Yeah.
Joe Walsh:
Everybody showed up and they've been showing up every year since. So we've been giving value. The results of these actually then lead into things like strategic insight papers, how people can approach different issues. So we take the content from those and actually publish papers for the community about how to better improve their use of engineering simulation.
Brock Taylor:
Yeah, there are so many interesting things about it. I don't even know whether to call it a show or an event or just the Congress, but it's entirely interactional all the way through. And even you have presentations. And we don't because that's private. Because to be open, the presenters are informed. We're not going to be sharing the details about what they're talking about, but you have people come in and talk about their projects where they are employing these advanced simulation techniques, mechanisms, solutions. And I mean, it ranges from medical to aerospace to everyday products. It's across the board. But it was fascinating just to hear the different projects and be thinking through all the different elements that these major companies and organizations are doing. But then there was that element of, again, the interaction of people would challenge other people. It's an open discussion and I don't know why you selected Congress, but in some ways it's what it felt.
Why is it called the ASSESS Congress? [18:31]
Joe Walsh:
Well there were two reasons why we accepted when we decided to call it the Congress because it really is related to, a congress is a discussion between people. And so we called it that for that reason. But we also called it that because the first reason why we first time we did it other than the summit was actually in the Washington DC area.. So we thought that that was an appropriate leverage factor. Cause we didn't want to call it a conference because it was never intended to be a conference. And as you mentioned, there are a few presentations, but their whole purpose is thought provoking to start discussions. Not to be the topic of discussion, but to initiate the discussions about bigger issues and broader experience. And bringing the people from a diverse range all the way from biomedical to aerospace has been critical to it.
And actually to find the commonality in the issues are the things we can address. One of the things that becomes common is we're already starting to see a dramatically increasing demand on computing resources just based on our continuing the 10 to 15% growth. Imagine what will happen in the demand for computing resources for simulation if we actually hit this inflection point in growth. Because today I think simulation and high performance computing is one of the biggest users. And it's, and it's going to, as we address these issues, which we are starting to be able to do with ASSESS in NAFEMS as we've successfully addressed those, that usage is going to explode.
Brock Taylor:
Yep. Again, it's why I get really excited getting to participate and talk to you. And I really thought last year, even when you pulled me aside and said that I would blend in more than I did and I was participating, but day one it always felt like I was trying to catch up to the conversation because my thinking and even my technical biases, if you will, going into it, were more of this is an integration problem. By day two I was on steadier ground, but I was doing a lot more listening and learning, as you said, just really soaking it in and I figured I would pick up some things from the Congress, but yet I walked away with a whole lot more to think about. Now I found it fantastic for me, especially because it really broadened the set of challenges in my mind of what we face to get to that inflection point, to help make it happen sooner and make that curve even smoother or bigger than what you're talking about.
ASSESS Congress Themes and Topics [21:24]
Because again on the system side, these are very complex solutions and we're talking, again, there's cloud computing, there's clusters, there's accelerators, there's technologies just flowing into this space and it is a very complex issue to stay on top of. And that's what CIQ is doing. But in really having this mindset of what is the simulation community is facing and understanding that it's a whole nother set of problems. And I want you to talk a little bit about the themes of the ASSESS Congress. Okay. Because that section where we actually break apart into groups and then go discuss specific themes and try to come up with next steps as an industry to address them was immensely eye-opening for me. So can you talk about the themes and just give a couple examples?
Joe Walsh:
Yes, I can. So what we did is the first few years we spent some time trying to figure out understanding the state and the point of commonality and what our goal was. And we put all that together and then we determined seven key themes about how we had to address things. Integration was one of those themes we have. Since then, we've actually archived one of the themes. And the reason why we archived it is because of the NAFEMS acquisition because it's actually that theme, we moved far enough, which is the theme of regenerative design. That theme is moved along far enough where it's actually better handled by the other part of NAFEMS on how to do best implementation. So the themes we are currently working with is what's the role of engineering simulation in the field of autonomy and autonomous everything, how, what's necessary for engineering simulation to support that.
ASSESS Congress and Simulation Credibility [23:16]
Another theme we're looking at is, how do we address the alignment or the lack of between government efforts, academic efforts and commercial efforts. Everybody's reinventing the wheel and that's not sustainable. Another thing we have is about engineering simulation credibility. How do we make it so that it can be trusted to do informed design decisions? That's really what engineering simulation's about is informed decision making. So how can it be trustworthy enough for that? So we have a whole theme about credibility. We have a theme about democratization. What's it take to actually spread this out broadly to everybody who could use it.
We have a theme about engineering simulation, digital twins, which is, okay, there's a special type of digital twin which actually does physics and that is the engineering simulation. Digital twins, not all digital twins, it's the engineering simulation digital twin. So we work at the Congress, we take two sessions on each of these themes with very specific questions. The autonomy will be a general one because we're just introducing that theme. But the others will have very specific questions so we don't reboil the ocean. And then the group of anywhere from five to 10 people meet in the session and then they come back and present that to the rest of the audience and we discuss it and we actually take those things and we convert those into, first, positioning papers about the theme, which are published and available in the NAFEMS website. And then strategic insight papers. What are major ways to change how you think about this issue? And we've done things like, for instance, understanding an engineering simulation risk model. So what's the risk associated with basing your decisions off of simulation? Because the goal is to move away from physical testing and prototyping as much as possible and move to virtual prototyping, saving time, cost and money.
Brock Taylor:
Yeah. It's just amazing. But I want to go back to the credibility theme because that was one, I'd maybe thought about it, but there was the, the conversation of confidence versus credible. And I don't want to repeat the example that somebody gave on the webinar, because again, we we all agree we're not going to share the specific details, but you can generalize it to simulation that goes into everyday machines like cars, airplanes, trains, things that we are all involved in or interacting with to some level.
Joe Walsh:
Your toaster, microwave, your dryer, your washer. Yeah.
Brock Taylor:
And in any one of those a failure could have health implications. So it's an element of just because you've got an answer and got an answer that looks okay. Is it right? Is it credible? And that was one of the groups that I participated in last year. It was really interesting to be a part of that discussion.
Confidence Versus Credibility in Engineering [26:46]
Joe Walsh:
When we started that theme, we had extensive discussions about the difference between confidence and credibility.Industry
And confidence is best described as how the person doing it or the group doing it feels about it. Credibility is how the others feel about it. So we referred to that as internal and external. And so the goal is to build credibility, but you can, you have to start with confidence.
Brock Taylor:
It's a little like maintaining a Linux kernel. There are kernel developers who are well known and there are people who will submit things to the kernel who are not well known. And so you can look right, you can actually function, right? You can have the testing, but you have to have somebody like a Linux kernel guru if you will, or a maintainer that's able to look at it and say, this is okay because we have a good handle on how this is going to fit in. And I use that as an analogy in my head last year, right. As to you, what really helped set it, it's the lead designer who's been building an airplane for 30 years and the new engineer straight out of college. That's using an app to design part of that airplane coming and saying here's the result. Let's build it. So again, fascinating to really be part of those conversations and shift the thinking away from, oh, the problem is just software integration and getting the hardware to work and run the applications. But it's the whole other layer of issues that a big organization faces in trying to adopt the simulation and trust it, as you say.
Joe Walsh:
There are business challenges, and that's the one theme I forgot to mention, it's just business challenges associated with it as well. And one of those challenges is communicating to executives the value that simulation brings to their strategic initiatives. And it does, and it has proven that in the aerospace, automotive and consumer goods areas. And the CEOs that saw that earlier really have moved their companies forward. The challenge is that the people doing the simulation don't know how to communicate to the executives for the other companies. And the executives don't understand the simulation. So we have a communication gap, which has nothing to do with what it takes to implement the technology. By the way, we have issues on what it takes to implement the technology as well. It's too hard, it's too difficult to set up really complex things, but we need to make that whole process and simpler. But even if we did that, we also have to address the communication problem. We also have to address, yes, there is an integration problem, but it's not or. It's, and, and, and. And as we do the things together, then we start to be able to get some real momentum going forward.
Brock Taylor:
Yeah. And it's a moving target. Yes. Absolutely. That's part of what we face. I mentioned the technologies that are streaming into the computing aspect, it's how many accelerators are going to be showing up, designed specifically to do a solver part of this simulation workflow, and where does that hardware exist, right? That's right. It's just, there's so many things coming in and we haven't even talked about security yet. So yeah. There's all these different things. So it is a deep challenge and that's why I really respect what the ASSESS initiative is about. And was thrilled to be a part of the Congress last year and really look forward to the one that's coming up in a couple weeks.
Joe Walsh:
It is the 26th to 28th, it's just, we're ready.
Why Does CIQ Sponsor the ASSESS Initiative? [31:00]
Brock Taylor:
Yeah. But I think you and the ASSESS initiative help represent the customer needs and the environment on such a deep level. I think that's why it makes total sense to me why CIQ would be a platinum sponsor of this year's Congress. Be there to participate and continue to participate. I mean, we need to help build the community and push it forward. Again, that's part of our DNA here at CIQ. We're feeding in a lot of foundational open source projects like Rocky Linux, like Apptainer. Again, these are technologies that don't necessarily come up in the conversation, but they need to be there to allow the simulation community to smoothly adopt and move forward again with this moving target of technology. So I'm really excited with the Congress that's coming up and really looking forward to it. And I know you're going to ask me why did we sponsored it? I gave the answer a couple weeks earlier, but I'll repeat it there maybe.
ASSESS Initiative and Simulation Security
Joe Walsh:
Yeah. So we appreciate your support on that. And you mentioned security. Think about this. When simulation is really being used correctly, it's being used to make informed decisions about things that are the most secure IP that a company's doing. So this is all about IP protection and the simulations themselves need to be protected because the nature of them is actually a corporate secret. Not only the decisions that are supported, but the whole method that's of how to do it. So these are valid issues. We need to get people involved from every aspect, software, hardware, operating systems, users. We need to get everybody to come together that says, okay, we know already that we can continue growing this 10% a year. We just do these new features and prove this performance. Everything's going to grow 10% a year. How do we grow 50%?
How do we grow 60%? How do we actually make that inflection point happen? How do we really see the benefit? How do we really shorten our product life cycles from two years to one year to six months to three days? The automotive industry has succeeded in taking over a couple different passes, took their product design cycles because of simulation from four years to 12 months. This is something that everybody's starting to look at, which means all of a sudden you gotta do that. You're doing a lot more simulation, you're doing tons more. Because you gotta look at all the alternatives. Autonomy opens up this huge thing. One comment was when you make a new car that's not autonomous and you test drive it, you test drive it 100,000 to 200,000 miles. For an autonomous vehicle, in order to handle all the circumstances you need to test a billion miles. It's not feasible if there's only one way to do it.
How Simulations Can Assist the Medical Industry [34:20]
Brock Taylor:
Right. Again, I wish I could give this specific example, but there was a medical example of that same nature right. Last year that we discussed. And it's not just designs that it's not feasible to do it physically, but there's advantages. So many different advantages of adopting simulation. So like I said, less expensive, faster time to market, but just being able to predict problems that are happening.
Joe Walsh:
Increased confidence, understanding that you're reducing the risk and you're not taking something and putting it out to a population and hoping it behaves well, but have no real clue. No, you're, you're testing it virtually and then knowing full well the results.
Brock Taylor:
Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Walsh:
We still have to crash. We still have a requirement to crash cars. We still have a flight certification for airplanes. Both industries will tell you those aren't tests of what's going to happen. They already know exactly what's going to happen. Those are just certifications and validations there should the approach they've taken that's starting to happen and others are no surprises.
Brock Taylor:
Yeah.
Joe Walsh:
No emergent behavior, no surprises. We understand everything that's going to happen before we do it.
The Goal of UMC4ES [35:52]
Brock Taylor:
Yep. Yep. And so last thing I'll ask you about and then we'll wrap it up to see if there are questions. I know part of the outcome from this initiative is something called the Unified Model Characteristics for Engineering Simulation, or UMC4ES. Tell us a little bit about that and again, just an overview. I know you've got a pretty lengthy presentation detailed.
Joe Walsh:
The UMC4ES is an output from the themes working group, from one of the themes related to integration. So that's from the integration theme. One of the issues we discovered very early on was across all the different types of simulations, across all different industries, people were using different languages. Or they're using the same language to mean different things. That wasn't a commonality. An example would be even the description of a parameter in a model-based systems engineering context in a CFD context meant different things. When you talk to the systems engineering guys, every model is parametric by nature. And if you talk to the CFD guys, there's no such thing as a parametric model. So what we did is we said, okay, we're going to collect all of the data, and we're going to try to create a common metadata representation, not a common model data model, but a common metadata model to describe the models that can be used across every form of engineering simulation. So that if I say, I'm using this form of mathematical form, or I'm doing this physics, that everyone can understand it.
And the goal first was to get a common language between people. The ultimate goal is to create an interface, a semantic interface through this that a model can talk to another model and say, can we connect? Are assumptions similar? Are we compatible?
Brock Taylor:
Yep. And I have to think the NAFEMS element is really going to help facilitate driving that element across different sections of the industry in different avenues of educating the workforce.
Joe Walsh:
So this is one of the areas where the two different parts of NAFEMS come into play, where ASSESS was key on the thought leadership and coming up with what needed to be there and what the dictionary needed to look like. And NAFEMS is looking at actually taking that and turning it into an international standard on metadata for simulation. So it's a nice one, two combination.
How Can You Register to Attend the ASSESS Congress? [38:49]
Brock Taylor:
Yeah. That's fantastic. So, okay, I am going to see, do we have any questions from any of our viewers? I think one is, the ASSESS Congress is by invitation. How does one go about getting an invitation to the Congress?
Joe Walsh:
The ASSESS Congress when it was prior to NAFEMS taking over was by invitation. Only after we became part of NAFEMS, it is no longer by invitation only. You can go to the NAFEMS.org website and you can click on the ASSESS Congress and you can just say Register.
Brock Taylor:
So there's actually time to register?
Joe Walsh:
There is time for people to still register for the Congress, and we still have some spots available. Like I said, we're about 60 people, and we'll have good discussions. We have room for some more, for people who do want to attend.
Brock Taylor:
Very cool.
Joe Walsh:
Be willing to have challenging, interesting open discussions. One of the things that we've done uniquely is there's no selling at the Congress, at least no official selling. If someone does something in the hallway, I'm not going to stop. But there's no selling in the Congress itself.
Brock Taylor:
Yeah. And everybody respected that. And you have, I mean, there were a number of vendors there and you can see there's a lot of sponsors that are sending people. But everybody participates. That's the element. The people who are there aren't there to sell. They're there to push things forward and participate in these work groups to be part of that discussion. And just being there is a soft sell in many ways because it raises the awareness, and the information was invaluable. Just my first time again, I can't wait for the next one because I think it's going to be fantastic. I'm really looking forward to it. So I don't think we have any other questions that I can see. So Joe, I really want to thank you for joining us again and for all viewing. Please like the webcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel and tune in next week for the next topic. Thanks everyone. See you next time.
Joe Walsh:
Thank you Brock, for having me. And I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks at the ASSESS Congress.
Brock Taylor:
Absolutely, Jeff.