VANCOUVER, BC, Nov. 21 – Lumerical Solutions, a Vancouver-based provider of optoelectronic and photonic design software, today announced that the latest release of their products are compatible with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This release expands on Lumerical’s industry leadership in terms of supporting high-performance computing (HPC) systems, with FDTD Solutions being the first commercial finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) solver engineered to take advantage of Amazon EC2. The compatibility of Lumerical’s products with EC2 provides research and design professionals with quickly accessible, cost-effective and scalable computing infrastructure to perform ever-larger volumes of simulations to design and optimize next-generation optoelectronic components, circuits and systems.

Prior to the availability of the Amazon EC2, selecting, purchasing, commissioning and maintaining an on-premise HPC system was a complicated and expensive commitment. This left many smaller companies and research organizations without access to the benefits provided by HPC systems while those who did make major investments in HPC systems often struggled to keep up with evolving user demands. With cloud computing, organizations can purchase almost limitless computing capacity as and when required, offering significant economic and operational benefits compared with buying a fixed computing capacity that either under-services peak usage levels or results in expensive hardware sitting idle.

“We are really excited to be among the leading companies to deploy cloud-based engineering simulation software to help organizations access on-demand computing resources and better address their changing computational needs,” says Adam Reid, Director of Software Development at Lumerical. “We’ve witnessed a high level of engagement among our customers when it comes to cloud computing, and today's product releases are only the first stage of cloud computing developments that Lumerical will undertake to help them overcome the urgent project deadlines they face.”

According to Chris Koo of Samsung Display Company, “with their recent support for Amazon EC2, it is great to see a company like Lumerical exploring exciting new ways to better support the photonics community and their need for on-demand, high performance computing systems”.

Quickly Accessible and Cost-Effective High Performance Computing

With EC2, it is straightforward to get started using the Amazon’s HPC hardware. Users access via a web browser the EC2 Management Console to create and manage their virtual compute servers. Using Lumerical’s machine images as a starting point, in a matter of minutes users can create a new virtual server with all of Lumerical’s products installed and configured, running on the latest HPC hardware. The users can then connect to their virtual compute server with a fully graphical remote access connection to perform their work.

“We’ve been using a pre-release version of FDTD Solutions on EC2, running hundreds of simulations to optimize the performance of integrated silicon photonics components, and we were impressed that we were able to get up and running FDTD Solutions on cutting edge HPC hardware quickly and easily,” says Tom Baehr-Jones, Associate Professor at the University of Delaware and Associate Director of OpSIS. “At OpSIS, our goal is to empower industry professionals to design, manufacture and commercialize technologies employing silicon photonics. Lumerical’s products running on EC2, combined with the foundry services offered via OpSIS, helps drive innovation in the silicon photonics space by providing cost-effective access to powerful design tools and state-of-the-art foundry services to industry professionals around the world.”

Scalable Computing Infrastructure

One of the primary benefits offered by support for EC2 is the ability of design professionals to cost-effectively access large banks of computing resources to conduct large-scale parameter sweeps or optimization tasks. Within minutes, the ability of researchers to start up tens or hundreds of machines allows for users to refine and optimize designs before important deadlines.

“We are designing large-scale integrated fluorescence collection systems for single-molecule real-time sequencing,” according to Dr. Annette Grot, Senior Staff Engineer at Pacific BioSciences. “With the need to run hundreds of finite-difference time-domain simulations to design and tolerance the integrated nanophotonic structures, the ability to run many simultaneous jobs quickly using Amazon's EC2 system offers tremendous promise for the ongoing development of our Zero Mode Waveguide technology.”

“Since our start, Lumerical has been on a mission to get fast, accurate simulations using modern and accessible computing hardware,” according to Dr. James Pond, Lumerical’s CTO. “This release builds on our market leadership in concurrent and distributed parallel computing and is part of our overall strategy to enable customers to optimize their designs as fast as possible.”

Learn more about how Lumerical’s products can be used on EC2 at http://www.lumerical.com/solutions/partners/ec2.

About Lumerical

Since its inception in 2003, Lumerical has pioneered breakthrough simulation technologies that help bring new optical product concepts to life. By empowering research and product development professionals with high performance optoelectronic design software that leverages recent advances in computing technology, Lumerical helps optical designers tackle challenging design goals and meet strict deadlines. Lumerical's design software solutions have been licensed in more than 30 countries by global technology leaders like Agilent, Aptina, ASML, Bosch, Canon, Harris, Northrop Grumman, Olympus, Philips, Samsung, and STMicroelectronics, and prominent institutions including Caltech, Harvard, Max Planck Institute, MIT, NIST, University of Tokyo and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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Source: Lumerical