Cloud Computing in Engineering Workflows: Transforming Design, Collaboration, and Innovation In today’s fast-paced engineering landscape, the need for speed, scalability, and seamless collaboration is greater than ever. Traditional engineering workflows often relied on on-premises servers, powerful local machines, and fragmented communication tools. But as projects grow in complexity and teams become more global, these systems can no longer keep up. This is where cloud computing steps in—reshaping how engineers design, simulate, collaborate, and deliver results. What is Cloud Computing in Engineering? Cloud computing refers to the use of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, process, and analyze data. Instead of being limited by the hardware capacity of a single computer or office server, engineers can leverage vast, scalable computing resources from cloud providers. This shift enables engineers to run simulations, share designs, and manage data more efficiently. Key Be...
Disk Attachment
Disk drives can be connected either directly to a particular host (a local disk) or to a network.
Host-Attached Storage
* Local disks are retrieved through I/O Ports as described earlier.
* The most common links are IDE or ATA, each of which allow up to two drives per host controller.
* SATA is similar with simpler cabling.
* High end workstations or other systems in use of larger number of disks typically use SCSI disks:
• The SCSI standard helps up to 16 targets on each SCSI bus, one of which is
normally the host adapter and the 15 other of which can be disk or tape drives.
• A SCSI target is usually a single drive, but the standard also bears up to 8 units
within each target. These would generally be used for retrieving individual disks
within a RAID array. (See below.)
• The SCSI standard also assists multiple host adapters in a single computer, i.e.
multiple SCSI busses.
• Modern advancements in SCSI include "fast" and "broad" versions, as well as
SCSI-2.
• SCSI cables may be anyone 50 or 68 conductors. SCSI devices may be exterior as well as interior.
* FC is a high-speed serial architecture that can handle over optical fiber or four-conductor copper wires, and has two variants:
• A large switched fabric has a 24-bit address space. This variant allows for
multiple devices and multiple hosts to linked, forming the basis for the
storage-area networks, SANs, to be talk over in a future section.
• The actuated loop, FC-AL that can address up to 126 devices (drives and
controllers.)
Network-Attached Storage
* Network attached storage connects storage devices to computers using a remote procedure call, RPC, interface, typically with something like NFS file system mounts. This is easy for permiting several computers in a group common access and naming
conventions for shared storage.
* NAS can be executed using SCSI cabling, or ISCSI uses Internet protocols and standard network connections, allowing long-distance remote access to shared files.
* NAS permits computers to easily share data storage, but tends to be less efficient than standard host-attached storage.
Storage-Areaa Network
* A Storage-Area Network, SAN, links computers and storage devices in a network, using storage protocols instead of network protocols.
* One advantage of this is that storage access does not link regular networking
bandwidth.
* SAN is very flexible and dynamic, permiting hosts and devices to attach and detach on the fly.
* SAN is also controllable, permiting restricted access to certain hosts and devices.
