Ansys, Microsoft Team on Cloud Engineering

Ansys has announced a collaboration with Microsoft to further integrate Azure cloud, HPC, digital twin and IoT services offerings. 

According to the company, Ansys Cloud, the underlying platform for running Ansys products in the cloud, integrates Azure cloud and HPC services with Ansys simulation technologies. New features will enable customers to use their existing software licenses and reduce modeling run times by increasing cores per job. Additionally, the company says the features will deliver price-performance improvements and incorporate customers’ existing Azure contracts. This could make it easier for larger organizations to migrate from on-premises HPC to Ansys Cloud.

"As a strategic partner and customer of both Microsoft and Ansys, our engineering teams will accelerate their product development processes with these dynamic new cloud capabilities,” said Scot Tutkovics, vice president, engineering operations, Rockwell Automation. "Adding Ansys Cloud to our existing technology infrastructure sped up our simulations by 50% and we have solved larger problems with more accuracy. Together, we are boosting engineering productivity and driving top-line impact, even while our engineers work from home.”

Ansys is also working with Microsoft to integrate Microsoft Azure Digital Twins with Ansys Twin Builder. Employing physics and simulation-based analytics, Ansys says that users can enhance operations — decreasing product maintenance costs and expediting next-generation products to market. Ansys’ runtime digital twins will be natively represented in Azure Digital Twins. 

Additionally, Ansys is collaborating with Microsoft to offer cloud-enabled autonomous vehicle (AV) simulation capabilities to joint customers. Ansys VRXPERIENCE, an AV virtual test platform, can be on Azure, giving auto designers the ability to test drive millions of virtual miles across multiple scenarios. The platform’s general availability is planned for January 2021.

“The rise of scalable, affordable, high-powered public cloud computing and IoT breakthroughs runs in parallel with our customers’ view of simulation as a strategic differentiator,” said Ajei S. Gopal, CEO at Ansys. “Bringing these elements together can significantly boost the impact and reach of simulation and equip Ansys’ vast user community to rapidly design and deliver transformational products on time and under budget.”

"Our collaboration brings together Azure's compute and IoT capabilities with Ansys' simulation excellence to help businesses across industries transform at scale,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud + AI at Microsoft. “During a time when autonomous systems are on the rise, Ansys will enable cloud engineers to increase productivity and accelerate the delivery of innovative solutions.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.