Fujitsu Expands On-Demand Access to Analytical Simulations

Back in August, Fujitsu rolled out a hosted technical computing offering, TC Cloud, which was aimed at the manufacturing, EDA and aerospace industries. In essence, the service was designed to offer a secure, high performance path to computational resources that could handle the complex simulations these industries rely on.

This week the company extended these offerings to include a new set of big data applications, this time aimed at both scientific and technical computing. The new addition to the service includes the ability to run packages like LS-DYNA, ANSYS, and other widely used CFD and thermal analysis applications.

In many ways this looks the same in terms of the computational boost behind the service as well as the class distinctions that differentiate the services. 

The original offering in August provided a “speedy” class that came with some VM overhead and was designed for meeting burst demands, followed by a “premium” class, that offers bare metal performance for mid-sized parallel jobs, and finally, Fujitsu pitched its crème de la crème high performance class, which is powered by high speed networks and offers the HPC environment needed for large-scale parallel tasks.

Like the first TC Cloud offering, the announcement of a new set of services under its analytical simulation banner comes with the same class distinctions, but is aimed at a new group of users. The company claims that their Analytical Platform Service Standard Class (mid-size jobs) and their High Performance Class offerings have been tested across a number of ISV applications designed to run structural analysis, form analysis, electromagnetic wave, and thermal analysis code.

The on-demand resources are priced per node at a minimum of one month of service (which seems odd given that for bursty needs or a one-time last minute product testing cycle only hours would be required). It is backed by 8 Xeon cores per node and a user-friendly portal to access the resources.  

The new addition here is their Analytical Help Desk, which is the point of support or dealing with large-scale simulations from the point of deployment and through the training and use processes. For now, however, the service and support are limited to Japan but if history is any indicator, we will probably a similar Western World-flavor version of this before too long, especially as Fujitsu struggles to keep up with IBM’s very similar manufacturing and scientific big data cloud offerings.