IT Trends
HPC is critical to making the right product design decisions. Engineering simulation tools from ANSYS take advantage of multicore parallel computing – with typical workloads executing on 10s to 100s or even thousands of processing cores. Leading organizations deploy well in excess of 10,000 computational cores to exploit the full value of CFD, FEA and other simulation technologies. Industry analysts expect this to increase by an order of magnitude over the next decade.
IT Made Accessible
Such infrastructure scale-up is driving the trend away from local or distributed computing, toward centralized deployments that are more easily managed and accessible to all. IT organizations that want to optimize costs related to engineering product development focus on data center consolidation and virtual desktop initiatives. Sometimes termed private clouds, initiatives like these aim to provide seamless user access to remote infrastructure inside the organization. They sometimes are complemented by public cloud initiatives, which employ external infrastructure to address peak capacity requirements.
Centralized Data Management
IP protection, security and compliance are also driving a move toward centralization – that is, centralized management of engineering data. While many organizations still rely on end users or departments to store and manage simulation data (in a distributed and often ad-hoc fashion), centralized data management and scalable federated data stores are are becoming key components of the optimized IT environment. This enables mobile platform strategies and reduces network bottlenecks related to simulation data transfer. Once factor that supports this trend is an increased focus on collaboration between geographically distributed work teams, providing a mechanism for sharing, retrieval, and re-use of simulation assets.