Engineers are unlocking increased compute capacity to achieve advancements in 5G, autonomous systems, electric vehicles, and other global megatrends thanks to ANSYS Cloud HPC, powered by Microsoft Azure. Available from directly within ANSYS engineering simulation software, ANSYS Cloud is helping organizations rapidly run high-fidelity simulations, shortening development cycles and increasing time to market.
Following its initial release in February, ANSYS Cloud has gained marketplace momentum — with hundreds of customers taking advantage of its functionality. Small and medium-sized companies are leveraging hundreds of compute cores to solve challenging problems without expensive on-premises HPC infrastructure. Larger enterprises with their own HPC resources are relying on ANSYS Cloud to offer extra capacity during peak usage.
We produced our large and complex cycling aerodynamics simulations on ANSYS Cloud, using Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Azure support for hybrid cloud scenarios, which delivered an easy, instantaneous and cost-effective connection to HPC whenever we needed it,” said Bert Blocken, professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology. “Our research team seamlessly linked to ANSYS Cloud on their desktops within ANSYS Fluent and conducted computationally difficult simulations with unparalleled speed. The simulation results were invaluable, revealing substantial aerodynamic gains that significantly advanced our research.”
Announced in May, the integration of ANSYS Cloud within ANSYS Electronics Desktop, including ANSYS HFSS and ANSYS SIwave, enables electronics customers to obtain in-depth product performance data for critical and time-sensitive electronics engineering decisions. For example, a customer designing high-speed electronics products using the distributed HFSS matrix solver dramatically decreased hardware requirements on a complex PCB — achieving an 85% per machine RAM reduction. In addition, the same distributed HFSS matrix solver was 2x faster in ANSYS Cloud and provided an overall 10x speed up.
ANSYS Mechanical users also benefit from easily accessible compute power to solve complex models beyond the reach of their desktop machines. “LPI, Inc. provides advanced engineering services to a wide range of industries and our team is often tasked with creating sophisticated, non-linear structural models that are computationally intense,” said Evan Schickel, senior. engineer, LPI, Inc. “ANSYS Cloud provides us the flexibility to take on projects with compressed timetables and complicated models that would be otherwise impossible.”
ANSYS Cloud is gaining significant momentum following its initial release, with our customers seeing immediate benefits from its increased simulation throughput and unequaled business agility,” said Navin Budhiraja, vice president and general manager of cloud and platform at ANSYS. “Incorporating ANSYS Electronics Desktop into the latest version of ANSYS Cloud allows broader customer access to on-demand HPC, greatly enhancing product quality and accelerating speed to market.”
With the benefits of Azure, ANSYS Cloud users across industries are cutting costs with the usage-based licensing model for both hardware and ANSYS applications — purchasing only the HPC capacity they need and avoiding large, fixed-capital expenditures. ANSYS Cloud creates seamless and secure cloud access by combining ANSYS’ leading software with Azure’s services for enterprise-grade security.
ANSYS Cloud’s traction with customers is a testament to the great scaling performance and security that Microsoft Azure delivers,” said Navneet Joneja, Head of Product – Azure Compute at Microsoft. “Organizations benefit from Azure’s vast number of on-demand compute cores to run large parallel and tightly coupled simulations, enabled by infrastructure specifically designed for HPC featuring RDMA InfiniBand. With Azure, ANSYS customers get performance without sacrificing security as sensitive proprietary data remains highly secure and protected by technologies that prohibit unauthorized access.”