Simr: Accelerating Innovation Using High-Performance Cloud-Based Simulation and Analytics

CIMdata Commentary

Key takeaways:

  • The creation of today’s highly complex cyber-physical products, combined with intense global competition and time to market pressures, requires significantly greater use of computer-aided engineering (CAE) to assess, validate, and optimize the functional performance of components and sub-systems, as well as complete systems.

  • The expanded use of CAE, the cloud, big data analytics, digital twins, and AI/machine learning is driving the need for ever-increasing access to high performance computing (HPC) resources by significantly more engineers across the global enterprise.

  • Simr (formerly known as UberCloud) provides enterprises of all sizes with an integrated, engineering computing environment for multi-discipline and multi-domain HPC applications running securely across public, private, or hybrid clouds.

  • To provide customers with an easy to configure and highly efficient user experience, Simr integrates with major cloud and CAE software products.

The focus on incorporating simulation-driven design methods for the development of complex cyber-physical systems requires much higher fidelity, multi-disciplinary models (e.g. structural FEA, flow, thermal, combined CFD/thermal, acoustics, electromagnetics, optics, Multidisciplinary Analysis and Optimization (MDAO), design of experiments, etc.) to ensure the validity and accuracy of physics-based “digital twins.” These high-fidelity digital twins can then be used confidently to make critical design tradeoff decisions throughout the product lifecycle.

Capabilities for multi-physics simulation, for cross-disciplinary data analytics, and for design optimization including the use of new artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to enable machine learning (ML) are driving the need for ever increasing amounts of high performance computing. The promised business benefits of the cloud and AI/ML have significantly raised the ROI expectations of senior management as well as making the use of these new technologies second nature for the next generation of engineers and technical scientists.

Research for this commentary was partially supported by Simr (formerly known as UberCloud).

Simr: HPC Cloud as a Service

Simr is an independent cloud services company headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, founded in 2012. Simr provides enterprises of all sizes with a flexible and scalable HPC cloud environment that runs multi-vendor CAE software applications securely on any Linux machines and in any cloud: public, private, or hybrid. Companies can run Simr on their preferred public cloud provider, or in their own private cloud. With Simr’s HPC Cloud platform, engineers can easily scale the size and volume of simulations up and down as the product design and validation workloads require, while IT can control fixed infrastructure costs and manage network performance and security. The benefits of using Simr address the varying needs of senior management, IT, and engineering disciplines across the enterprise.

CIO and IT Organization

  • Enterprise Integration—Simr’s HPC Cloud containers and its Kubernetes-based automated self-service engineering simulation platform can be fully integrated into the company’s IT environment as part of a company-wide digital transformation initiative.

VP Engineering and CAE Managers

  • Productivity—Increase in productivity of engineers, enabled by the fully automated cloud process.
  • Control over Digital Assets—Implementation of the engineering simulation environment in a company’s own cloud account enables exclusive control over company CAE software licenses, simulation workflows, and data.
  • No Price Markups—Simr allows customers to run their simulation environments within the customers’ own cloud subscription.

Simr customers enjoy all price-performance benefits offered by cloud providers without any price markups.

CAE Analysts and Engineers

  • Control—Simr’s automated cloud process allows engineers to configure a well-suited, application-adapted cloud resource environment.
  • User-Friendly—“Cloud with one click” through browser-based, highly secure, interactive and batch use of the simulation environment.
  • Ease of Use and Analyst Productivity—Same look and feel UI across all cloud services minimizes learning curve and enables rapid adoption by new users.
  • Analysis Process Productivity—Avoids unnecessarily large data file transfers from cloud to on-premises CPUs by leveraging the integrated remote visualization of results.

Simr Industrial Application Examples

The Simr Engineering Simulation Platform has been successfully implemented on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud since 2018 across a number of industries to enable multi-disciplinary design analysis and optimization. Simr focuses on the manufacturing, life sciences, energy, and finance industries and is used by some of the largest companies in the world. Some notable customer applications include:

Buro Happold: Optimization of Building Designs using Explicit Nonlinear FEA

Headquartered in Bath, United Kingdom, Buro Happold has a history of building storied projects that push engineering boundaries. With Simr and HPC on Azure, they run simulations in hours that used to take days.

FLSmidth: Building Tomorrow’s Sustainable Infrastructure

FLSmidth adopted the Simr Engineering Simulation Platform, based on Microsoft Azure, to optimize its global HPC environments and enhance performance.

Freudenberg Technology and Innovation

Freudenberg decided to migrate their engineering workloads to Azure to provide engineers access to their customized simulation workflows.

3DT Holdings: Working to Revolutionize Heart-Valve Surgery

3DT Holdings is utilizing Simr’s capabilities to develop a decision-support solution for heart-valve surgery, enabling real-time guidance in the operating room.

Conclusion

The increased use of CAE and data analytics tools is a trend that has been underway for several decades. The HPC Cloud is expected to be the next-generation computing environment that enables digital transformation for engineering and product development. CIMdata’s opinion is that the Simr Engineering Simulation Platform offers an impressive suite of capabilities to enable simulation-driven design by enabling multi-disciplinary analyses and web-based collaboration.

CIMdata expects that the implementation of HPC Cloud-as-a-Service will lead to significant growth in the use of Simr’s HPC Cloud technology.