The cloud enables companies to capitalize on computing resources without installing and maintaining them on-premises. It helps businesses to optimize CapEx costs, improve agility, and simplify scaling. Simulation software enables companies to explore and predict how products will work — or won’t work — in the real world. It can speed time-to-market, lower manufacturing costs, improve quality, and decrease risk. It also thrives on computing power.

Ansys, a global provider of simulation software, recently announced a strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), which led to a new product offering available via AWS Marketplace: Ansys Gateway powered by AWS. After customers subscribe and complete a series of onboarding steps, they can deploy and scale Ansys applications on a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or high-performance computing (HPC) cluster via the Ansys Gateway powered by AWS web portal.

Instead of being limited by static, resources-constrained, on-premises high-performance computing (HPC) resources, or not being able to access HPC resources at all, customers can leverage their own AWS cloud subscription via Ansys Gateway powered by AWS. By logging onto the Ansys Gateway powered by AWS web portal, they can access the extensive compute and storage resources from AWS to initiate a simulation run of any size, from anywhere, and at any time. By leveraging an easy-to-use, web-based platform that enables quick and reliable deployment of Ansys and other third-party applications in a cloud environment, Ansys customers can accelerate innovation.

How Simulation and the Cloud Speed up Innovation

“The product cycle is becoming shorter day by day,” said Neehar Kulkarni, Manager, Cloud Product Management at Ansys. “Nowadays, simulation plays a key role in removing the need to perform expensive and time-consuming prototyping and testing. By enabling engineers to analyze product designs early in the development cycle, simulation can arrive at the optimal design faster. However, our customers are asking themselves how they can remove the hardware barrier that prevents them from achieving their product development goals so they can move even faster.”

Simulation requires an adequate computing infrastructure to efficiently run through hundreds, thousands, or even millions of potential product concepts and improvements. The cloud plays a big role in removing any hardware barriers, but there are workflow challenges it helps to solve as well.

“As products have become increasingly complex, customers are relying on a stack of different design, analysis, and optimization software tools,” said Kulkarni. “Installing, tuning, and managing these software toolchains is a big challenge for IT teams and engineering managers. Ansys Gateway powered by AWS facilitates streamlined deployment of these simulation tools and workflows in the cloud so that companies can focus on their core competencies.”

Product design and development can require multiphysics or multiple physics computer-aided engineering (CAE) software toolchains, in addition to computer-aided design (CAD) software. Ansys Gateway powered by AWS enables seamless deployment of several Ansys applications that are optimized for AWS cloud infrastructure and makes it easier for customers to use third-party CAD/CAE tools. This helps reduce the burden on a company’s IT team to deploy, install, and tune complex engineering simulation tools in the cloud.

The Cloud Enables Engineering Flexibility

Kulkarni said the idea of openness and flexibility is ingrained in the Ansys Cloud product collection.

“The first thing that we observed is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution,” he said. “Indeed, all customers are different — whether they are a startup or big enterprise account. The level of need will vary when it comes to running simulation workloads. One thing we’ve learned from our customers is that they all want flexibility on when, where, and how they want to run their simulation workloads.”

He said some companies have been “born in the cloud” and therefore, they have not invested in building on-premises compute and storage capacity. As these companies run complex workflows that generate more and more simulation data, cloud computing enables them to scale storage up and down as needed. It can be difficult to provision on-demand storage like that on-premises. Other companies might have invested in on-premises cluster capacity and use the cloud to burst their simulation workloads when they have peak demand to complete urgent, time-sensitive projects.

“Cloud is essentially an enabler for our customers to get maximum value from our best-in-class simulation products,” said Kulkarni. “Based on our open ecosystem strategy, we believe in providing flexibility to our customers on how they want to adopt the cloud. For some, this flexibility means enabling customers to deploy and use their own cloud infrastructure while making it easier for them to use their existing Ansys licenses as effectively as possible. This is exactly what we are offering to our mutual Ansys and AWS customers via Ansys Gateway powered by AWS.”

Learn more about Ansys Gateway powered by AWS.