Manufacturing companies across a variety of industries are under continuous pressure to bring their products faster to market compared to their competition. Realistic Simulation is becoming an increasingly integral part of the product development process and many companies are realizing the advantages of performing simulation earlier in the design process as opposed to waiting to use simulation for final design validation or after discovering a problem with their product in the field.
The need for realistic simulation, leveraging technology such as Finite Element Analysis (FEA), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) or coupled Multiphysics simulation, has been increasing over the years. This is evident from the fact that, according to CIMdata, the Computer Aided Engineering market has been growing at the rate of 10-11% a year.
FEA and CFD simulation technologies benefit greatly from High Performance Computing (HPC) hardware as well as elastic computing software. From our experiences, a majority of our customer’s simulation workload can be described using the graph shown in Figure (1). Often times, there is a surge in simulation requirements (highlighted in green) and not enough software licenses (tokens) to run simulations.
To address our customer’s peak simulation needs, we have introduced scalable and flexible licensing for Abaqus powered by the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform on the cloud. Abaqus users now have the option to purchase consumable Simulation Credits or Reusable Simulation Tokens. These new cloud credits and tokens can be used in conjunction with the Abaqus tokens they may already have on-premise to execute simulations either on their own hardware or on cloud hardware infrastructure hosted and supported by Dassault Systèmes.
Reusable tokens are checked out by the license server when a simulation job is running and once the job is done, the tokens are checked back in so that you can use it again. For simulation credits, these are consumable. Meaning, when you buy in packs of credits and they are used up after performing various simulations, a customer needs to purchase new credits. Typically credits are purchased on a quarterly or yearly basis.
This new scalable and flexible Abaqus licensing enables our customer’s meet their peak capacity when needed, both in terms of software and hardware. The fact that it is powered by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform also enables them to take advantage of its capabilities for knowledge capture, process integration, simulation data management and social collaboration.
For more detail, read Sumanth Kumar’s interview with Microsoft Magazine.
