Intersect360 Research White Paper: SimOps: Automating Engineering

Innovation Across Today’s Tools

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

As scientific progress continually pursues new discoveries, engineering perpetually seeks to implement these advanced principles into innovation, creating new or improved products and features across the landscape of our lives. Advanced engineering uses computational modeling and simulation to augment the limitations of physical testing. Today, traditional computing methods can be augmented by advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, widening the aperture of what can be done computationally. Furthermore, companies and research organizations can use cloud computing resources to augment on-premises data centers. These options all increase the possibilities of simulation, as well as the potential complications.

Backed by $20 million in new funding, Simr, formerly known as UberCloud, is addressing these challenges by introducing and automating “simulation operations automation (SimOps),” with its new engineering productivity suite, Simr Platform. The Simr Platform runs in single-tenant cloud environments, using organizations’ own client accounts, with high-performance application containers designed over a history of working with engineering modeling and simulation. Simr Platform is already deployed by major companies embracing the flexibility and innovation driven by SimOps.

MARKET DYNAMICS

Innovating Innovation

For decades, the advanced simulations enabled by High Performance Computing (HPC) have fueled scientific discovery and engineering innovation across multiple industries and domains. One of the major industries that has leveraged these techniques to the greatest effect has been manufacturing, for products ranging from cell phones and golf clubs to threshers and jet engines. In 2023, manufacturers spent $6.4 billion on HPC technologies, improving product quality and efficiency in multiple ways.

As the technologies that power HPC have evolved, so have the applications for engineering. Mainstays like computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis still fuel aerodynamics and crash simulations. The big data revolution brought analytics into the forefront, affecting product lifecycle management and supply chain optimization. Meanwhile, cloud computing became a viable option for elastic, on-demand computing capabilities, without the necessity of a major on-premises data center commitment.

Today, AI is changing the game yet again. Autonomous driving or driver-assist features are one obvious change vector in manufacturing. Beyond self-driving vehicles, AI brings innovation to simulation itself, allowing engineers to explore more design options in less time. Computational steering of HPC applications is one of the most common uses of AI among organizations with HPC experience. The combination of HPC and AI itself continues to move forward, bringing new generations of innovation to engineering.

Average Percentage of Total HPC-AI Workload in Public Cloud,

Current and Future

More Possibilities to Manage

The full range of these advancements—new computing capabilities, fueling HPC, analytics, and AI, on-premises and in the cloud—also brings new challenges. Other areas of IT have looked at optimization across multiple tools, profiles, and resources through the concept of operations, or “ops.” DevOps, for example, is a well-established concept, for managing projects with overlapping goals across distributed software development teams. Similarly, many enterprises have turned to DataOps to manage data sovereignty while advancing its value for high-performance analytics.

Engineering now faces similar challenges with respect to simulation. Over 90% of HPC users have expanded their environments to include AI, and this has corresponded to an increase in GPU-accelerated computing nodes. All of this represents new capability, but engineering departments have the challenge of optimizing simulations on multiple projects across on-premises, hybrid-cloud, and multi-cloud resources.

INTRODUCING SIMR PRODUCTIVITY SUITE FOR ENGINEERING SIMULATIONS

Bringing Innovation Forward as Simr

UberCloud – now called Simr - was founded in 2012 during the original push toward cloud computing for HPC workloads, offering consulting services and application expertise for HPC cloud migration and optimization. Today, Simr has secured $20 million in new Series A funding, which it will direct toward Simr Platform, a new engineering productivity suite for product owners and the engineering teams they work with.

The Simr Platform is already deployed in three of the world’s seven largest companies (combined revenue $310 billion), according to Simr, as well as several other manufacturers, down to small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). The Series A funding includes investment from BMW i Ventures, a strategic partner of global automotive manufacturer BMW Group.

Addressing SimOps with the Simr Productivity Suite

Simr aims to dramatically improve product design and manufacturing by automating what it calls "simulation operations automation (SimOps)," thereby greatly reducing operational complexity for engineering and IT. The Simr Platform and the high-performance application containers incorporate best practices compliant with SimOps, drawn from more than 200 Simr customers and partners, representing the varying requirements of a broad spectrum of engineering applications. SimOps also provides maturity models users can employ to assess and intelligently guide their progress.

The Simr Platform runs in a single-tenant cloud environment in the engineer’s own cloud account. To address HPC-AI users’ nonnegotiable need for secure computing, the Simr Platform’s software layer adds additional security components to the numerous features already provided by major cloud infrastructure providers. The Simr high-performance container VM encapsulates simulation workflow and data to isolate it from other workloads and resources.

Intersect360 Research Analysis

Sending HPC and AI workloads to external cloud environments is an increasingly popular choice for companies and other organizations that rely on design engineering. These organizations typically employ a hybrid combination of on-premises and external cloud resources, but a growing numbers of engineering organizations now rely entirely on cloud services providers.

For organizations new to HPC-AI cloud computing, learning to use these resources time- and cost-efficiently can be a challenging, trial-and-error process. As noted above, many engineering applications may have their own computing and resource requirements. This is why, soon after its founding, Simr began calling its engagements with customers and technology partners "experiments." The company still uses this term, even though Simr reports that 100 percent of its engagements are now successful.

UberCloud, now Simr, was founded with the purpose of easing cloud adoption for HPC workloads. With the Simr Platform, Simr is taking another step in innovation, easing the challenges in a hybrid world: both HPC and AI, heterogeneous processing elements, on-premises and cloud.

With AI on the rise, competing processing elements in development, and cloud projected to be an enduring component of the HPC-AI landscape, the need to optimize engineering simulation workloads isn’t going away soon. In fact, Simr is on the early end of the wave, just as it was during the introduction of cloud. With its Series A funding and resulting launch, Simr has a strong opportunity for market success that could move it to its next stage of company growth.