Large-scale analytical simulations are at the core of research and development efforts in a wide variety of manufacturing operations, including those in the automotive, electronics, and aerospace industries.

Despite the clear need manufacturers have for accessing and running analytical simulations, using such applications comes with a host of challenges. Inherent scaling issues, workload distribution on strained physical resources, and contending with a bevy of licenses that require attention as use fluctuates are all pain points for many smaller manufacturers.

Back in June of this year, IBM recognized the needs of manufacturers who needed scalable, on-demand access to complex modeling, simulation and analytical capabilities. The company rolled out a high performance computing cloud offering aimed at easing product development, life sciences advancement and academic research.

IBM’s HPC Cloud offering includes a management suite, an implementation service and “intelligent cluster solutions” which translates into all the switches, storage and servers that make up the guts of a private cloud. In answer to that call, Fujitsu rolled out its own technical cloud computing service, this one focused also on manufacturing—but with a different spate of services and offerings, some of which are part of an on-demand, virtual machine-based service and others appear in some ways similar to IBM’s HPC cloud offering.

Today’s announcement of TC Cloud signaled the arrival of a technical cloud computing service aimed at easing access to analytical simulations. The TC Cloud focuses on the needs of manufacturers in particular by providing a platform for analytical simulations, an application provisioning service and a support module known as the Analytical Help Desk, which helps users set up and run their simulations.

Fujitsu claims that the manufacturing sector can benefit from the scalability since many have highly variable demands for computational resources. Additionally, they suggest that their new technical computing cloud service will allow users to run their simulations on their platform without the need to invest in infrastructure—and then make informed decisions about whether or not they want to invest more thoroughly in the hardware required to run their applications.

Fujitsu uses its own datacenters and resources to provide the analytical platform service and works with each customer to create a simulation environment, then turn that analytical simulation around to become a cloud service.

Through its new platform Fujitsu addresses the distinct needs of manufacturers by offering three levels of service; a speedy class service, which is delivered via a VM environment and allows for basic scalability—one that is in tune with small to mid-sized manufacturers.

The next level up, Premium Class, offers the same service but delivered via a physical server environment. They claim that this class will allow users to expand or shrink their environment in about a week, making it a good fit for the same manufacturing business sizes and better for those with medium-scale parallel computing workloads.

The High-Performance Class of the Fujistu technical cloud computing service provides a complete on-demand HPC environment connected via a high speed network.

Nikon has been making use of the High-Performance Class Analytical Platform Service to handle irregularities in power supplies in Japan and to make their analysis work in other areas more efficient.

According to a Nikon representative, the company "started using Fujitsu's TC Cloud to help us cope with the electricity shortages that were expected in the summer.” The Nikon rep went on to note that “Once we actually used it, we found it offered several advantages beyond our original objectives in using the service. We were able to start running our analyses much more quickly than if we had used our own computational resources. As well, no maintenance was required due to Fujitsu's expert support and we were able to run high-speed analyses because the TC Cloud's computational resources were well-tuned.”

The services will be introduced in a series of phases, beginning in the third quarter of the year.