SCIENCE

Altair Engineering announced the general availability of HyperWorks On-Demand (HWOD), a high-performance computing (HPC) solution for design innovation in the Cloud. HWOD leverages Altair's patented licensing system, providing access to HyperWorks and a modern, scalable HPC infrastructure through a secure and efficient Web-based platform.

Customers can use their existing HyperWorks Units (HWUs) or purchase a pool of HWUs residing on HWOD to gain access to an extensive selection of Altair products and the HPC infrastructure required to run those applications. The Altair products currently available on HWOD include RADIOSS, a multi-disciplinary finite element solver for structural analysis; OptiStruct, a structural optimization solver; AcuSolve, a finite-element-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver; and Altair's BatchMesher, a high-fidelity finite element mesher for large assemblies. Additional solutions, including solvers from the HyperWorks Partner Alliance and HyperWorks desktop applications, will be added soon.

"The fluctuating demand for computing resources is a reality that enterprises across all industries increasingly face in today's product design environment," said Martin Nichols, EVP Global Alliances and Operations for Altair Engineering. "For more than a decade Altair has provided customers flexibility and value through our unique HyperWorks 'pay-per-usage' license model; we are now extending the power of HWUs, providing access to a complete HPC environment. HWOD finally brings software, platform and infrastructure as a service – SaaS, PaaS and IaaS – to our customers within a single and intuitive solution."

HWOD is the only HPC cloud offering that allows customers to simultaneously leverage the power of their existing software licenses (in this case, HyperWorks Units) to access HPC hardware and Altair's best-in-class CAE products. It supports multi-tenancy where each customer (tenant) gains access to dedicated resources within a secure environment. HWOD utilizes the HyperWorks Enterprise infrastructure, which provides the users with an intuitive and powerful interface. Users first generate the model on their desktop, then upload their data to the Altair cloud and quickly obtain their results. Project workloads can be submitted, monitored and reviewed anytime, anywhere.

"Altair HyperWorks On-Demand is an excellent solution to Dorel's growing computational requirements," said Altair customer Rajiv Menon, director of R&D, Advanced Technologies & CAE for Dorel Juvenile Group. "It provides immediate access to high-performance computing resources at an attractive rate. HyperWorks On-Demand and RADIOSS – Altair's solver for FE analysis – have become standard tools for product design and validation at Dorel."

The HWOD platform uses the market-leading HPC workload management capability of Altair's PBS Professional, as well as state-of-the-art job scheduling, monitoring and analytics tools for efficient resource utilization, access to the cloud for job submission and subsequent accounting.

Altair can also provide turnkey and configurable private cloud solutions, offering all the efficiency and flexibility of HWOD completely within the customer's firewall.