Watch CBS News

Altair Launches Private Cloud Appliance for CAE

TROY (WWJ) -- Altair, a global provider of simulation technology and engineering services, announced the launch of HyperWorks Unlimited, offering companies a fully configured hardware and software appliance for computer-aided engineering.

Altair's HyperWorks Unlimited, a managed private cloud system, offers unlimited use of all Altair software, including HyperWorks applications and PBS Works workload management tools. With HyperWorks Unlimited, users no longer have restricted access to HyperWorks software applications, making high-performance computing far more accessible for the CAE community.

"As a global leader in CAE and workload management software, Altair is uniquely positioned with our domain knowledge and software licensing model to lower the barriers of high-performance technical cloud computing," said James R. Scapa, chairman and CEO of Altair. "Procuring, managing and maintaining large HPC clusters is a complex and challenging process, especially for small and medium businesses. HyperWorks Unlimited addresses this issue head-on by providing limitless access to our software within a pre-configured, fully supported hardware appliance for cloud-based simulation."

In the past, cloud computing adoption has been severely hampered within the CAE domain for three primary reasons: first, the elastic scalability of application licensing; second, the prohibitive amount of time associated with the mobility of big data from clusters to local machines for effective post-processing and visualization; and third, the perceived data security concern associated with public clouds. HyperWorks Unlimited eliminates all of these issues.

"We have reached an inflection point in product design where hundreds of thousands of mid-sized manufacturers are now looking to be even more competitive by moving beyond traditional computer-aided design environments and into simulation-based design," said Stephen Wheat, general manager of the high performance computing group at Intel Corp. "This requires a tremendous amount of compute power that's easy to deploy, manage and use. Altair's innovative turnkey solution, based on Intel Cluster Ready technology, unites HyperWorks software with powerful compute hardware based on the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 product family, enabling manufacturers to quickly move into simulation-based design."

In addition to being fully optimized for running massively parallel applications such as computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis solvers, HyperWorks Unlimited also includes Altair's Display Manager, a remote visualization Web-based portal that allows graphically intensive, interactive applications to be accessed on HyperWorks Unlimited, including in networks with challenging latencies. HyperWorks Unlimited is designed and configured to be HPC ready, providing greater accessibility to run pre- and post-processors "out of the box" within the customer's own location, and is completely managed and supported by Altair.

Altair has partnered with SGI as the primary hardware provider for HyperWorks Unlimited, offering full capabilities of compute, networking and storage resources. SGI's legacy in HPC and market leadership in reliable hardware for tackling the demands of technical computing and big data distinguished the company as the partner of choice to enable HyperWorks Unlimited to provide a compelling solution.

"We are convinced Altair's expertise in the CAE and HPC sectors, in combination with our history of providing world class hardware in this domain, will provide an extremely powerful private cloud solution. We are committed to jointly provide incredible value to end customers worldwide by simplifying the implementation of a powerful, in-house HPC system," said Jorge Titinger, President and CEO of SGI.

"Our years of expertise in developing and consuming massively parallel numerical applications, high performing 3D visualization software and efficient workload management software have enabled us to develop an extremely optimized state-of-the-art cloud platform which forms the backbone of HyperWorks Unlimited," said Sam Mahalingam, senior vice president of software development at Altair. "The technology stack alleviates all of the cloud adoption issues -- big data, access to resources, job management, 3D visualization, license mobility, security and data management -- by bundling the HyperWorks suite, PBS Professional, Compute Manager, Display Manager, and in the future Simulation Manager and Process Manager. HyperWorks Unlimited is an innovative solution that will rapidly change the way organizations design products."

HyperWorks Unlimited is now available globally. To learn more, visit www.altair.com/hwul.

Privately held, with more than 2,000 employees, Altair has offices throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. With a 28-year track record for high-end software for engineering and computing, enterprise analytics solutions, and innovative product design and development, Altair consistently delivers a competitive advantage to customers in a broad range of industries. To learn more, please visit www.altair.com or www.simulatetoinnovate.com.

View CBS News In
CBS News App Open
Chrome Safari Continue
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.