Adaptive Corporation Leverages the Elasticity of the Cloud with Rescale

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Background and Challenge
Adaptive Corporation is a leading Digital to Physical Product Lifecycle Company that helps streamline business processes, reduce costs and improve efficiencies for customers that need to bring new products to market. Our CAE team runs explicit crash/impact simulations and large non-linear analysis for structures and components for our customers, who include leading manufacturers in Industrial Equipment, Aerospace, Auto, and Life Sciences. For these simulations, we use Abaqus, Nastran, Adams, Isight, fe-safe, and Tosca.

Our workload for our CAE consulting is project-based and varies quite a bit during the course of the year. Prior to using Rescale, we were custom building or purchasing our own HPC system. We were resource-constrained.  We either had underutilized computing capacity between projects or not enough capacity when multiple projects were underway at the same time. Too often, we experienced bottlenecks when we needed to solve multiple jobs simultaneously because we were limited with our smaller HPC system. Projects would run over schedule as a result.

Our mission is to craft tailored solutions that help our customers shorten development and production cycles throughout product planning, development, manufacturing, and aftermarket service processes. The simulation and analysis bottlenecks were undermining our ability to do that, so we needed to look for a solution. In addition, our on-premise hardware was out-of-date within 2 or 3 years, so we were spending a lot of time and effort every few years to upgrade our hardware and we needed an IT support team to maintain the servers and licenses.

The Rescale Solution
Two years ago, as bottlenecks became more frequent, we started to look to the cloud for bursting. We chose Rescale due to competitive pricing and their ability to work with us to customize the solution to our IT needs. We ditched our existing HPC system and now have a “reverse hybrid” cloud computing environment, in which we mostly rely on Rescale’s unlimited, on-demand capacity to meet the demands of our simulation engineers but occasionally run jobs on our desktops as well.

We have been running Abaqus on Rescale since 2014 and since we do so much computing on Rescale, we actually host our license on their server as well. On occasion, when we need to run simulations on our desktop computers, we’ll tap into our license server on Rescale. It’s a seamless process that saves us the headache of license management.

Results and Benefits
With instant access to more CPUs and faster hardware on Rescale, optimized to our simulation needs, our CAE consulting business has been able to solve jobs significantly faster than we could before–more than 10x faster! And with the availability of on-demand resources on the cloud, we now have access to hardware that can respond to our constantly changing compute needs. We’ve found it to be much more cost-effective to use the cloud, paying only for the hardware that we actually use, and to always have access to the current hardware offerings.

We’ve also been able to significantly reduce our IT overhead. We’ve eliminated the need for license server maintenance completely. We’ve reduced IT spending dramatically, never have underutilized compute capacity, and our employees can focus on engineering. We can now focus our resources on the value-added business activities, not on managing hardware. Rescale has helped us improve our operational efficiency.

About Adaptive Corporation
Adaptive Corporation is the leading Digital to Physical Product Lifecycle Company that helps streamlines business processes, reduce costs and improve efficiencies for customers who need to bring new products to market.  Adaptive’s growth is powered by working closely with its 500+ customers to overcome the challenges around product development. Our customer base includes leading manufacturers of industrial and consumer products and the suppliers that provide the underlying sub-systems. Adaptive’s unique “Digital to Physical” product portfolio includes CAD/CAM, CAE, PLM, business analytics, metrology, and 3D printing solutions from leading IT providers.  Using a combination of these offerings, the Adaptive team crafts tailored solutions that help our customers shorten development and production cycles throughout product planning, development, manufacturing, and after-market service processes.  For more information, visit www.adaptivecorp.com.