Simr Blog

Your engineering productivity is only as good as your tools

Written by Thomas Francis | Mar 6, 2019 6:02:00 PM

An engineer is only as productive as her tools. Imagination and passion may drive her; but she needs great software and lots of powerful computing to iterate fast and bring the vision to life.

 

We are in the golden age of computing. Cloud is mainstream and anyone with a credit card can join the party. So you would think a high-value engineer at an enterprise would be all set, right? Not according to the data. Engineers are still struggling to get the computing power to simply get by. Forget about moving faster. Cloud adoption by engineers is a fraction of what it should be. And the anecdotal evidence from the engineers we speak with daily at UberCloud is even less rosy.

 

So what's the problem? Why the scarcity amid the plenty?

 

Shortages are rarely because there's not enough. Shortages are usually because it's hard to get the stuff to those who need it the most. It is a logistics problem.

 

So for an engineer struggling with slow simulations, its no good that the company has a cloud account with millions of cores. Those cores are useless to the engineer if there's no easy way for him to run ANSYS on it.

 

Fortunately, help is at hand. There is a ton of great working happening in this space; companies are building the layers required to put the unlimited power of the cloud in the hands of every engineer. UberCloud works with engineers at enterprises that have embraced the cloud and are now figuring out how to get it to those who need it the most. Software containers are a key enabler for these customers to get a repeatable, predictable and user-friendly on-ramp to the cloud. Deep partnerships with software vendors such as ANSYS, Siemens and Dassault enable those codes to be made available on a variety of hardware platforms. Cloud such as Microsoft Azure already feature these codes powered by UberCloud.

 

At last - we are at a time when high performance computing is something no engineer should be without.