ANSYS Provides Path to Cloud HPC

ANSYS has been talking up “pervasive simulation,” or the ability to deliver analysis capabilities that are accessible by a broader engineering audience throughout the different phases of the design process. To buttress that vision, the company unveiled ANSYS Cloud, a capability that delivers on-demand cloud high performance computing (HPC) access from within its flagship simulation products.

ANSYS Cloud, built on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, makes the power of on-demand HPC resources for high-fidelity simulations directly accessible within its standard simulation applications. The on-demand capability—initially available directly from within ANSYS Mechanical and ANSYS Fluent, but slated for other tools in the ANSYS simulation portfolio—gives engineers access to virtually unlimited cloud compute resources so they have adequate throughput to solve larger, more complex simulations, according to Navin Budhiraja, vice president and general manager, cloud and platform business unit at ANSYS.

Easy Access to HPC

ANSYS Cloud enables companies that don’t have ready access to HPC resources to explore more complex designs and more frequent design iterations without having to deploy additional applications or to maintain costly and complex HPC resources.

“Companies that have lacked HPC hardware at their disposal work with smaller models, which means less accuracy in their final output from a simulation standpoint, or they might explore fewer design options, resulting in a product that’s not optimized,” Budhiraja explains. “ANSYS Cloud helps them get around the lack of enough horsepower to do simulation.”

To access the cloud HPC capabilities, users simply work within their familiar ANSYS desktop simulation tool and log into their cloud account. From there, they create a new job, choose the closest available data center, pick from a set of pre-defined hardware configurations that are optimized for the particular solver they are using, and submit the job. The files are automatically encrypted, sent to the cloud, and HPC resources are provisioned on demand. Once the job is running, engineers can monitor the progress of their simulation from their desktop application or from the ANSYS Cloud portal using any web browser, including on a mobile device.

Users are notified via email when the job is complete, and they can return to the web portal to visualize and interact with the 3D simulation results while the data is still stored in the cloud. The simulation results can also be downloaded to the local workstation to perform detailed post-processing work.

Budhiraja says the combination of ANSYS software with Microsoft Azure services and HPC infrastructure create seamless cloud access that will help further democratize simulation.

“Cloud is an excellent way of expanding our spectrum of users,” he says. “Pervasive simulation is what we are all about, and the cloud is a critical building block in that story.”

Users can unlock the ANSYS Cloud through the company’s standard license by purchasing ANSYS Elastic Units.