One significant drawback of the cloud-based service model is that conventional CAD tools and cloud-based services alike provide no mechanisms for verifying that a task to be performed within the cloud is actually error-free and ready to be processed. Thus, the end-user may submit a task to a cloud-based service, only to discover later that a flaw existed in the task. In such a scenario, the results generated by the cloud-based service may be correspondingly flawed and unusable. Worse, the end-user must spend capital regardless of whether the task submitted for processing is flawed and regardless of whether the results can be used.

As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a more effective approach for verifying processing tasks prior to execution.

Various embodiments of the present invention sets forth a non-transitory computer-readable medium storing instructions that, when executed by a processor, cause the processor to generate an approximate solution to a design problem, by performing the steps of generating design problem geometry associated with a design problem, synthesizing a problem specification based on the design problem geometry and a set of design criteria, determining that the problem specification satisfies minimum input requirements for a solution engine resident within a client computing device, and executing the solution engine to generate an approximate solution to the design problem, where the approximate solution includes a range of possible design solutions.

At least one advantage of the disclosed approach is that it allows an end-user to review and verify an approximate rendering of potential design solutions before causing a computationally intensive, and possibly expensive, rendering of design solutions to take place.