Univa Solutions For Manufacturing

The Manufacturing industry comprises a wide array of business types, from aerospace and automotive engineering to electronics and software production. Likewise, most large companies in other industries operate a manufacturing arm. Across this broad range of business functions, however, the needs are similar: engineers must find ways to deliver superior designs as quickly as possible so the company can get product to market faster than the competition.

The resulting demand for compute capacity to power this effort is significant. Business and design problems alike require highly complex analyses involving massive data sets. Traditionally, the increasing demands for power from functional areas like computer-aided engineering and design (CAE and CAD), computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element analysis (FEA) have been supported by investments in more hardware. The resulting IT landscape statically binds applications to silos of dedicated power, which are underutilized the majority of the time.

The challenges around managing, let alone optimizing, these types of environments are many – including:

  • High infrastructure complexity and cost
  • Poor visibility into capacity and utilization
  • Product quality issues

Today's design engineers need access to unrestrained, flexible computing capacity on demand, so that design cycles can be as fast, cheap, and productive as possible.

With a Univa solution, engineers, designers and testers can operate unhindered by capacity and technology constraints and can focus where they should: on the design process. Our solutions enable companies to perform process simulation, modeling, and optimization at a highly increased rate – so key products get to market faster. Univa solutions allow manufacturing organizations to unleash a vast array of additional capacity from high-performance computing (HPC) and to streamline the process of scheduling workload. In addition, our solutions for application virtualization help companies' drive millions out of the IT infrastructure by reducing hardware and software license investments.

Manufacturing organizations are faced with a number of computing challenges as they seek to optimize their IT environments, including high infrastructure cost and complexity to poor visibility into capacity and utilization. Today's design engineers need access to unrestrained, flexible computing capacity on demand, so that design cycles can be as fast, cheap, and productive as possible.

Our Manufacturing clients are leveraging Univa's grid and cluster solutions in the design cycle and within mainstream IT. Our solutions deliver a range of benefits to:

  • End Users – Engineers and designers can improve performance for key applications in crash testing, structural analysis, fluid dynamics, and computer-aided design. In addition, collaboration between user and project teams is enhanced with easy access to archived best practices from common HPC job interfaces, as well as capabilities for improved workflow. Univa provides transparent operation while retaining end user autonomy – so the user stays in control but is less involved with the underlying IT infrastructure.
  • IT Managers – With the centralized IT management enabled by Univa solutions, operational efficiency is enhanced and resource utilization is optimized. In addition, Univa solutions enable policy and SLA-based resource allocation, so application performance is assured. Our solutions let companies optimize the overall IT budget through enhanced visibility into utilization patterns.
  • Financial and Executive – With increased visibility into how hardware and applications are being utilized, companies can make better budget decisions. In addition, Univa solutions enable usage-based accounting so that accurate pay-per-use can be achieved.

Univa's grid and cluster solutions help Manufacturing organizations reduce the time lapse from design concept to delivery with increased computational capacity and reduced management complexity.

In addition, Univa's alliances with key software vendors ensure that your most critical applications will operate at a highly increased rate of productivity.

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With Univa, manufacturing professionals can reduce design timeframes, expand the scope of work, reduce infrastructure costs, and maximize software license utilization. Whether your goal is faster time to market, greater engineering processing capacity, or reduced infrastructure costs, Univa has the proven technology to meet your needs.

Specific use cases include:

Increasing Application Performance for Faster Time to Market

In most Manufacturing organizations, application license management and utilization is built around a static infrastructure, which prevents dynamic, flexible license usage. In addition, the infrastructure itself is being quickly commoditized and is very cheap to acquire. However, the management of the infrastructure continues to be very expensive and is a significant contributor to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). In this environment, optimizing application utilization can be difficult and costly.

With Univa solutions, the computing infrastructure becomes completely transparent to the users. License utilization is optimized as the grid dynamically allocates applications to devices based on availability and other parameters. Application characteristics are continually monitored and infrastructure changes are initiated automatically, thereby reducing the TCO and improving service levels. The resulting infrastructure is variable, dynamic and extremely cost-effective for the organization.

Simplifying the Computing Environment

Many design and engineering processes today are tied to applications running on a fixed, static IT infrastructure, which constrains usage of those applications in many ways. IT cannot respond quickly to changing business needs that require adjustments to the infrastructure – in fact, change management is a manual process that can take months to complete.

With Univa solutions, manufacturing organizations can streamline their operations to make better use of existing resources. Our solutions abstract the complexities of the underlying environment away from the end user and provide the centralization, visibility and control to achieve a higher level of productivity.

Reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the IT Infrastructure

From the design labs to the enterprise data centers, the complexity and heterogeneity of Manufacturing IT organizations is growing. These facilities are costly to own and operate, whether used to drive the corporate ERP system or power crash simulations and testing.

With Univa solutions, companies can simplify the environment and drive out unnecessary costs, so that budget can be spent in more value added areas of the business. Our solutions also enable companies to leverage utility computing services in order to avoid sizing the infrastructure for peak demand.

In addition, Univa's alliances with key CAD/CAE, CFD and FEA software providers ensure that your most critical applications can operate at a highly increased rate of productivity.