Electrostatics simulations on the cloud with NCLab

This survey paper describes NCLab (Network Computing Laboratory), a novel cloud computing service that is pioneering free web browser access to finite element simulations. Presently, these include general second‐order linear partial differential equations, linear elasticity problems, and electrostatics problems (all in two spatial dimensions). The modeling process consists of geometry definition in the web browser, mesh generation on a remote server, specification of material parameters and boundary conditions in the web browser, computation on a remote server, and visualization in the web browser. The module supports curvilinear elements and higher‐order finite element discretizations. In this paper we present the modeling process using a sample electrostatics problem. Numerical results are provided.