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November 30, 2022

AWS Announces AWS SimSpace Weaver

LAS VEGAS, Nov. 30, 2022 — AWS has announced AWS SimSpace Weaver, a fully managed compute service that helps customers build, operate, and run large-scale spatial simulations. With AWS SimSpace Weaver, customers can deploy spatial simulations to model dynamic systems with many data points (e.g., traffic patterns across an entire city, crowd flows in a venue, or factory-floor layouts), and then use the simulations to visualize physical spaces, perform immersive training, and garner insights on different scenarios to make informed decisions.

AWS SimSpace Weaver allows customers to run a simulation that has more than a million entities interacting in real time and create more sophisticated environments than previously possible, while reducing the time to simulation deployment from years to months. AWS SimSpace Weaver handles provisioning Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances as well as managing the network and compute infrastructure, so customers can focus on designing and observing simulations in real time, across multiple live viewers. There are no upfront commitments or fees to use AWS SimSpace Weaver, and customers only pay for the amount of compute used.

Today, customers across industries such as transportation, robotics, and public safety need to create dynamic, 3D experiments to understand possible real-world outcomes and visualize and train in immersive spaces. For example, to realize the impact of road closures, a customer can simulate different closure combinations on their routes. These types of complex spatial simulations demand significant compute resources, stretching the existing limits of their compute capacity.

Additionally, integrating and scaling a spatial simulation with millions of interacting objects across compute instances is a difficult process. It requires dividing the simulation—and its components—into pieces, keeping those pieces simulating at a consistent rate, and replicating relevant data across the environment as well as among multiple live users. Solving these problems can require years of investment and specialized hardware, resulting in simulations that are too costly for all but the most well-funded organizations. Further, spatial simulations must be programmed to capitalize on the size and density the additional compute enables, requiring specialized teams trained in compute configuration and utilization. As a consequence, customers make tradeoffs in the sophistication of their simulation logic, limiting them to only exploring basic scenarios, while more nuanced problems—particularly those that are sensitive and expensive—are merely estimated.

AWS SimSpace Weaver is a fully managed compute service that enables customers to run complex, large-scale spatial simulations where they can conduct experiments that closely approximate real-world systems and visualize immersive training spaces. AWS SimSpace Weaver supports more than a million moving objects like people, cars, traffic lights, roads and more, each with their associated behaviors and properties all interacting in real time. Like an actual city, the simulation is an expansive “world” in itself.

To build simulation applications, customers can use the AWS SimSpace Weaver software development kit to incorporate their custom simulation content or use built-in integrations for third-party solutions like Unity and Unreal Engine 5. Once a customer is ready to deploy their simulation, AWS SimSpace Weaver automatically sets up the environment, connects up to 10 highly available, low latency Amazon EC2 instances into a networked cluster, and distributes the simulation across instances. AWS SimSpace Weaver then manages the network and memory configurations, replicating and synchronizing the data across the instances to create a single, unified simulation where multiple concurrent users can interact with and manipulate the simulation in real time. Customers can focus on designing simulations, observing the performance of simulations, and applying their learnings to prepare for scenarios and make business decisions.

The scale and elasticity of AWS SimSpace Weaver—through its pay-as-you-go model—means customers do not need expensive hardware or additional headcount to manage spatial simulations. AWS SimSpace Weaver allows a variety of customers to easily run complex, immersive 3D experiences and test and visualize large-scale scenarios.

“Previously, if a customer wanted to scale up their spatial simulation, they had to balance the accuracy of the simulation with the capacity of their hardware, which limited the usefulness of what they could learn,” said Bill Vass, vice president of Technology at AWS. “AWS SimSpace Weaver removes the burden of managing simulation infrastructure, simplifying how customers run large-scale simulations and freeing them to focus on creating differentiated content and expanding access to simulation development. Whether the goal is to simulate the population of urban megacities, track logistics operations on a continental scale, or build real-world scale digital twins for smart city initiatives, AWS SimSpace Weaver empowers customers to create vast, distributed simulations.”

AWS SimSpace Weaver provides a local development environment for customers to iterate and test a version of their spatial simulation for free on their personal hardware, before running their simulation at scale on AWS. The local environment also uses the same APIs as AWS SimSpace Weaver, so customers can transition their simulation to the cloud without modifying any code. AWS SimSpace Weaver is generally available today in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), and Europe (Stockholm), with availability in additional AWS Regions coming soon.


Source: AWS

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