Microsoft : Altair democratizes access to computer-aided engineering with Azure

My high school physics teacher taught us about metal fatigue by having everyone bend paper clips back and forth until they broke. In the real world, engineers use computer simulations to test their designs. From the trivial paperclip to the life-saving crash analysis, computer-aided engineering (CAE) improves products around us every day. But accessing the massive power needed for these simulations can be tough for small organizations.

That's where our partners at Altair have stepped in. Altair is democratizing access to CAE by building their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings on Microsoft Azure. In a case study we recently published, Altair describes how their HyperWorks Unlimited Virtual Appliance gives customers the combination of software and scale they need to quickly run their CAE workloads.

But that's not the end of the story. Altair recently brought their Inspire software to a SaaS model as well. Inspire Unlimited provides a visual cloud collaboration platform for engineering. Inspire Unlimited attains the required scalability by onboarding multiple users on a virtual machine. Using Azure's NV-series virtual machines, which feature NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs, Altair's customers can get powerful virtual workstations without having to purchase expensive hardware. This allows users to collaborate with only a web browser, sharing engineering designs of parts and assemblies with colleagues and suppliers.

Microsoft's commitment to providing a wide variety of HPC-ready capabilities made it easy for them to move workloads with different requirements to Azure. And the trust that customers have gained from using Office 365 and other Microsoft products means they know their data is well-protected in Azure. To learn more about how Azure helped Altair bring CAE to the masses, read the full case study.