130 INTERVIEW Enhancing simulations for success According to Dr John Baker and Krishna Samavedam, Ansys’ dedicated Microsoft Azure platform is paving the way for smoother, more flexible simulations in the manufacturing industry When working on simulations, engineers must have the means to work quickly, efficiently and unhindered by technical difficulties. To ensure it can deliver simulation solutions that can fulfil these needs, Ansys carries out frequent surveys to identify engineers’ biggest pain points, says Dr John Baker, EMEA cloud business development manager at Ansys. “Currently, one of the top barriers our customers face is the need to reduce design cycle times as simulations continue to get more complex and require larger computational capacity.” The firm’s cloud solution, Ansys Access on Microsoft Azure, addresses this problem by providing customers with access to highperformance computing (HPC) infrastructure in Azure. “Ansys Access on Azure provides an interface for engineers that allows them to easily create virtual machines, autoscaling HPC clusters and shared storages, and having them in the cloud means they can scale up and down as needed,” says Baker. One of the key features of Ansys Access on Azure is the HPC Platform Services (HPS) capability. “HPS is Ansys’ new job submission tool, which allows users to submit jobs to remote clusters easily and without having to leave their Ansys application interface whether they are in the cloud or on-premises,” says Krishna Samavedam, cloud lead product manager at Ansys. Whilst there are several benefits to using the platform, the power of ‘bring your own licence’ (BYOL) and ‘bring your own environment’ (BYOE) are “the main driver and the primary use cases for Ansys Access on Microsoft Azure,” according to Samavedam. “Customers are sensitive about their engineering data, and they want to ensure that it doesn’t leave their cloud environment,” he explains. “Our service allows customers to bring their own cloud environment and licences. Another advantage of BYOE is that customers can install third-party tools manually to complete their end-to-end engineering workflow.” Businesses around the world have benefited from adopting Ansys Access on Azure, including Movares Europe, an engineering consultancy firm based in the Netherlands. “Some of our customers really valued the ability to create standard desktops for day-today work but still have access to a much larger, more powerful machine when needed,” said BY AMBER HICKMAN “ Our service allows customers to bring their own cloud environment and licenses” KRISHNA SAMAVEDAM
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