With an increasingly challenging commercial environment, and the need imposed by safety principles to reduce both fuel consumption and pollutant emissions, the development of new engines can now benefit from the advances of computational fluid dynamics. Engine CFD is a most challenging simulation problem. This is caused by the spread of time and space scales, the excursion amplitude of most parameters, the high quasi-cyclic unstationarity of engine flows, the importance of minor geometry details, the number of physical and chemical processes including turbulent combustion and multi-phase flows to model. However, engine CFD has now reached a state where it has become a widely used tool, not only for engine understanding, but also increasingly for engine design. Undoubtedly, laser diagnostics in optical access engines have also brought significant help.