ACADEMIA

MSC.Software announced that it has teamed with IBM to jointly offer MD on Demand in conjunction with the IBM Deep Computing Capacity on Demand (DCCoD) offering. This collaboration will enable customers to take advantage of MD Nastran in an on demand environment to meet peak analysis demands to ensure right-to-market and minimize time-to-market for products in highly competitive environments. MD on Demand supports IBM's on demand initiative and provides a flexible, rapid and strategic solution for customers' business environments. MD on Demand is a hosted service where customers can perform MD Nastran analysis in the DCCOD Centers. MD on Demand is intended to be a service that provides additional capacity in surge situations or provide an option to customers who have a need to perform complex simulations but not on a regular enough basis to justify the purchase of the application and the supporting infrastructure. "MD on Demand is an excellent example of true innovation in the area of enterprise simulation and has the potential to be an ideal solution to run in the IBM Deep Computing Capacity on Demand centers," said David Gelardi, vice president of Deep Computing, IBM. "The DCCoD global centers contain over 14,000 processors including the MD Nastran performance leader, the System p5 with powerful new POWER 5+ technology. This massive computing power helps enable customers to scale beyond in-house limits on an on demand basis. IBM DCCoD when combined with MD on Demand can offer flexibility, potential cost savings and help address the most demanding simulation problems." "Utility computing is an emerging opportunity in the technical computing market and is seeing continuing investment from both systems and applications suppliers. IDC believes that one of the major advantages utility strategies offer end users is the ability to access specialized computational resources on an as needed basis," said Christopher Willard, IDC Technical Computing Systems vice president. "Multidiscipline simulations combine independent aspects of product design problems into a single unified analysis. Up until recently, such analysis was limited by both the availability of raw computing power and generally available applications software. The MD on Demand offering provides both the hardware and the software components to users on an as needed basis." "MD on Demand is based on MD Nastran, widely considered to be the world's most powerful enterprise simulation solution," said Andy Meyer, vice president of corporate marketing at MSC.Software. "By providing engineers with integrated and multidiscipline simulation capabilities of this depth and breadth, we are providing them with the confidence in their product's performance under a multitude of conditions. MD on Demand provides customers additional costs flexibility and by providing these capabilities on demand via MD on Demand, the cost savings are even greater."