Hmm … CFD results via Twitter

Every so often, someone comes along and does something I honestly would not have thought of: Symscape, a UK CAE vendor, announced recently that release 2.0.1 of its Caedium product includes “the world’s first automated simulation telemetry system for posting images to TwitPic and posting associated messages (tweets) to Twitter.” The company says that this new feature can be used “if you want to check on the progress of a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation while you are away from your simulation’s host machine and you have access to Twitter. It is also a great way to share CFD simulation progress with other colleagues on Twitter in real-time.”

Twitter as a means for exchanging possibly sensitive business data? Maybe not such a great idea. Remember that your Twitter timeline can be accessed by anyone who want to subscribe (unless you specifically block them or hide access to your tweets — and I’m not sure how secure that really is from a determined hacker) and is probably eminently discoverable in patent and other legal proceedings. Secure it is not.

But this is still a very creative way to tie together technologies. Since it’s often difficult to predict when a simulation will converge, simply being pinged to know that it is done has tremendous value. Using Twitter to do this is an imaginative combination of an emerging technology and old-school engineering.