Linux Containers Simplify Engineering and Scientific Simulations in the Cloud

While many cloud providers today offer powerful computing infrastructure as a service, and enterprises are already making routine use of it, the adoption of cloud computing for engineering and scientific applications is lagging behind. Despite the many benefits cloud resources provide, reasons for this slow adoption are many: complex access to clouds, inflexible software licensing, time-consuming big data transfer, no control over their assets, service provider lock-in, to name a few. But recently, with the advent of the Uber Cloud´s high-performance container technology many of these roadblocks are being removed. In our paper we describe the current status and landscape of clouds for engineers and scientists, the benefits and challenges, and how Uber Cloud is providing an online solution platform and container technology which reduce or even remove completely many of the current roadblock, and thus offer every engineer and scientist additional compute power on demand, in an easily accessible way.