OnScale emerged from stealth in 2018 with $3 million in Seed funding to deploy the first and only Cloud Simulation Platform, with the promise of breaking cost and performance barriers for engineers solving tomorrow’s toughest R&D challenges.
In their own words, with OnScale, engineers can run massive sweeps of full 3D multiphysics simulations in parallel to create true Digital Prototypes – digital representations of physical devices that capture the complete performance over its operating envelope.
The Power of OnScale
Our collaboration with OnScale is one of the pinnacles of our professional journey, as we have always hoped to work on a technology as complex and challenging as the one developed by the Silicon Valley start-up. Combining computer aided engineering (CAE) tools based on proprietary multiphysics solvers that were developed and validated for more than 30 years, OnScale delivers unequaled solver performance that easily scales to meet ever-changing CAE workloads. With the limitless power of cloud High Performance Computing leveraging best-in-class hardware, security and availability, OnScale’s platform removes performance and cost constraints of legacy CAE/HPC and reduces design cycles from months to weeks, and sometimes even days.
Our Contribution
Our focus was UX and UI development, with a tech stack consisting of Material Design, Figma, Three.JS, Angular 9, D3.js, NgRx Store and Jest.
OnScale’s leadership wanted a cohesive team with vast experience that could speed up the development process, and we rose to the challenge with a lineup now consisting of one designer, four frontend engineers and a project manager.
We started our partnership in the summer of 2019 with a UX redesign. Our designer worked on improving the application’s aesthetic, and brought a new, fresh appeal to the interface using Material Design for layouts and Figma for ideation.
The UI development process had already started when our engineers were added to the project, in March 2020, but since joining, they have broken new ground in terms of architecture, development speed and quality. The existing team had already created a wonderful 3D modeler with Three.JS, on top of Angular 9, so that engineers from all over the world could visualize prototypes in a way that has never been seen before. Our team worked closely with theirs and successfully managed to:
- add a new layer of abstraction over the Angular material components;
- ensure a pixel-perfect implementation of the design which took the visual concept to a whole new level of UX;
- add NgRx Store with pure ngrx methods for API requests;
- switch from Jasmine to Jest for snapshot advantage;
- restructure the entire project to fit the latest modularization trends.
Challenges
One of the biggest challenges was the management of intercontinental communication between teams from Tokyo (Japan), Iasi (Romania), Glasgow (United Kingdom) and Atlanta (Georgia, United States). While initially we had to be available for EET midnight meetings which could last for hours, our project manager leveraged a transition to SCRUM, ensuring that stand-ups were kept short, sweet, and governed by purposeful interaction. In this sense, we are now working primarily with the Glasgow team in an Agile framework.
Another big challenge was the architecture, with its handling of data and reusability throughout the application.
The first thing we did was to update all packages to their newest versions, followed by adding the NgRx Store, with custom pure NgRx helpers for faster development and data handling throughout requests. Our senior developers then orchestrated a replacement of chart libraries with D3.js, which subsequently facilitated (as much as) a tenfold increase in saved memory. We then proceeded to restructure the project to make better use of modules and components.
The entire process of refactoring, while not yet finalized, allowed us to reduce the overall size of the project, improve the degree of reusability and, most importantly, speed up development as a whole while consolidating the existing code base.
What’s Next?
We’re quite proud of our contribution to the project, and we constantly receive great feedback from the OnScale team. With a close deadline for the Beta release, we’ll continue to put our best efforts into developing this fantastic product, and we look forward to continuing our collaboration for many more sprints to come.
Interested in learning more about our services? Make sure to read our Cisco Webex and Ciitizen case studies, and drop us a line if there’s anything that we can help with.
