Introducing MSC SimEnterprise: A Brave New World for enterprise product development

You’ve been using MSC Software simulation solutions to accelerate time-to-market, squeeze out costs, and improve product innovation and quality – so what’s next?

What’s the next big thing that will help your company gain the competitive advantage it needs for repeatable, market-defining innovation?

It’s SimEnterprise from MSC Software and it’s maximizing the value your organization gains from using simulation solutions. Over the past several months, MSC Software has been spreading the word globally about SimEnterprise and the latest MSC Software solutions based on this new enterprise simulation platform. This article will help you understand what this breakthrough means for you as a business leader, you as an end user, and the PLM market in general.

Islands of Simulation Capabilities

Today, more and more companies rely upon simulation technology to speed and improve innovation and product development lifecycles. Replacing the dependency upon expensive physical testing with the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of simulation has enabled companies to be more responsive in the face of global competition.

However, the typical simulation process, especially in non-MSC Software environments, often involves highly-skilled specialists building and solving models across multiple simulation tools. These islands of disconnected simulation practices result in a lack of cohesion and consistency, inability to easily re-use data and processes, and an incomplete audit trail or pedigree. In short, for many enterprises the simulation process is still too time-consuming and disjointed.

Adding to the problem of disconnected development is the impact of globalization. With the growing trend to offshore engineering, research, and development as well as the integration of suppliers earlier in the production and development process, teams around the world often conduct simulation in isolation from other teams – without the benefit of leveraging best practices, shared data, and results from others in the organization.

What’s Needed Is An Enterprise Simulation Platform

A scalable, integrated enterprise simulation platform is required to solve the problem of silos of simulation across the enterprise and the supply chain. An enterprise platform makes simulation capabilities available to a broader range of constituents within the organization, improves collaboration across the enterprise, ensures consistency and repeatability via best practices and data sharing, and leverages high performance computing resources to support more complex, larger simulations.

An enterprise simulation platform or framework is designed to enable the development of enterprise-wide simulation solutions that interact seamlessly with one another as well as scale effortlessly with an enterprise’s requirements. Similar to SAP’s NetWeaver technology or Microsoft’s .NET, a simulation framework provides the underpinnings for world-class, extensible, and flexible simulation solutions that span the needs of the enterprise.

Most importantly, an enterprise simulation platform must deliver multi-faceted scalability to address changing stakeholder, performance and simulation requirements on a global scale. To gain sustainable competitive advantage, manufacturers need to make simulation an enterprise-wide resource – opening up the benefits across the board and optimizing product development efforts. To do this, enterprise simulation must be able to scale as companies’ needs grow, be usable across a variety of skills and jobs, and support best-in-class multidiscipline analyses.

The Vision Becomes Reality – Enabling Integrated, Enterprise-Wide Use of Simulation Technology

Enter SimEnterprise: MSC Software’s new simulation platform. SimEnterprise and the solutions built upon it offer the enterprise-level capabilities you need to move the product development lifecycle to the next level. By introducing SimEnterprise, MSC Software is the only vendor that delivers the trifecta of simulation capabilities needed to elevate simulation to a strategic, scalable, enterprise-level resource: high performance computing, broad constituent access, and multi-discipline simulation.

SimEnterprise is an enterprise simulation platform that enables MSC Software and its partners to efficiently deliver best-in-class technologies in the form of services to any and all simulation applications architected for the SimEnterprise framework. It’s the foundation on which four new MSC Software simulation solutions are based: MD Nastran, SimDesigner, SimManager, and SimXpert. By employing this consistent development framework, these solutions have the ability to easily interact with each other – sharing services, models, and data seamlessly.

With SimEnterprise, MSC Software is able to effectively build next-generation solutions that leverage its successful 40-year heritage of developing leading technology for driving product innovation. SimEnterprise enables MSC Software to incorporate best-in-class components of its CAE tools into new solutions. For example, MD Nastran employs best-in-class solver technologies, including: MSC Nastran, Adams, Marc, and LS-DYNA.

Three Core Business Benefits: The Enterprise Scalability Triad

With SimEnterprise, MSC Software is the only vendor that delivers the triad of capabilities needed to make simulation a strategic, enterprise-wide resource. These enterprise capabilities center around the concept of scalability to support an organization’s growing simulation needs.

High Performance Computing

With the mounting reliance on simulation, organizations are performing increasing numbers of simulations and iterations. Simulation complexity is also on the rise as products become more complicated. These trends both result in higher volumes of data and larger, more complex problems.

Simulation software must be able to take full advantage of high performance computing to support these trends and reduce the time needed to generate the results of analyses. The SimEnterprise framework and the solutions built upon it support the full range of high performance computing choices enterprises require, including 32-bit, 64-bit, grid, and cluster computing. MSC Software is the only CAE solution that supports a true ILP64 high performance computing (HPC) environment. It’s also the only solution that is enabled for Microsoft Compute Cluster Server (CCS). An option for customers using MD Nastran, MD on Demand enables analyses to be performed in the IBM Deep Computing Capacity on Demand (DCCoD) centers.

http://mdondemand.mscsoftware.com

Easy Consumption of Information by a Broad Range of Constituents
Many simulation tools on the market today require a highly-skilled expert to use them – limiting collaboration and the benefits of simulation to just a few isolated groups within the organization. SimEnterprise opens up the simulation environment to a broad base of potential users or constituents, allowing companies to harness intellectual property related to product design and development and make it applicable for use across the enterprise and even the supply chain.

SimEnterprise enables solutions to be deployed that support a range of potential stakeholders, including: designers, casual engineers and analysts, expert analysts and methods experts, management, and globally-distributed stakeholders such as offshore development partners or suppliers. In addition to scaling across the breadth of stakeholders, SimEnterprise enables the different constituents to share the same data sets and models – increasing understanding and collaboration while improving results and reducing efforts. With the recent introduction of several SimEnterprise-based solutions, MSC Software offers the broadest application of simulation benefits across a company and its partners.

Multidiscipline Analysis

SimEnterprise provides the foundation for the most comprehensive, integrated, multidiscipline environment available today. SimEnterprise enables best-of-breed services to be accessed from different simulation solutions while leveraging a single, common functional product representation or model. This means that solutions built upon SimEnterprise can share services and data, eliminating redundancy and additional efforts normally required to create new models and leverage results when moving from one simulation product to another.

In addition, SimEnterprise enables true multidiscipline simulation that reflects real-life interaction for a more realistic result. SimEnterprise and MSC Software products built upon it support the range of disciplines needed for today’s demanding product analyses:

• Motion
• Structures (Linear and Nonlinear)
• Crash
• Durability
• CFD
• Thermal
• Acoustics
• Optimization
• Flight Loads
• NVH

Existing MSC simulation software is fully compatible with the SimEnterprise framework, enabling current MSC customers to continue to leverage their investment in MSC solutions going forward. MSC Software has designed SimEnterprise to allow easy migration to SimEnterprise-based solutions as customers’ enterprise needs grow and change.

The Key to Deliverability: The Service-Oriented Architecture

In order to enable simulation solutions to interact seamlessly and scale effortlessly, a platform based on a service-oriented style of information technology architecture is required. Service orientation takes applications and breaks them down into individual functions and processes, called services. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) lets you model, assemble, deploy, and integrate these services independent of applications and the computing platforms on which they run.

Built around the open, standards-based concept of SOA, SimEnterprise delivers an Open Multi-Discipline Service Architecture (OMD-SA) and a set of core services used by simulation applications. The OMD-SA is an extensible and flexible SOA that has been uniquely designed to meet the demands of high-performance, multidiscipline enterprise simulation. OMD-SA was designed using today’s emerging open standards for interface definition and Internet standard protocols.

Providing a robust, core development platform, SimEnterprise enables MSC Software, its partners, and its customers to reap the benefits of a framework that allows them to scale as their needs change – in all the areas enterprises require. Non-SOA architectures simply cannot provide the scalability across key enterprise requirements: computing performance, stakeholders, and disciplines.

For more information regarding the SimEnterprise SOA architecture, please refer to the SimEnterprise white paper. (Link to http://www.mscsoftware.com/products/siment_white.cfm)

Just The Beginning

Setting the stage for the future, MSC Software and its partners are building solutions that help extend and leverage the investments in enterprise simulation technology that MSC Software customers currently have. Over the next 12 months, MSC Software will continue to grow its scalability across the enterprise triad of performance, stakeholders, and disciplines. For instance, new solutions will include disciplines such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and mechatronics.

“While the CAE industry has long been designing leading edge technologies, the way in which they share information is often antiquated and out-of-date. With the introduction of SimEnterprise, MSC Software is focusing on changing the way designers and analysts communicate in order to speed design and production, bringing efficiency boosts to global business,” said Ed Miller, president of CIMdata. Miller continued, “SimEnterprise is intended to provide a service-oriented architecture approach for the MSC Software solution suite in order to enable groups across a supply chain to more easily locate, interact, and take advantage of the information that is captured in simulation tests.”

SimEnterprise is the next generation of simulation technology, delivering the framework for unique solutions that provide enterprise collaboration, reuse, best practices, and knowledge sharing. Scaling across computing performance, stakeholders, and disciplines, it supports all of your company’s existing MSC Software investments while enabling you to ramp up productivity, collaboration, and efficiency.