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Case Studies > Major Manufacturer Streamlines Its Digital Engineering Workflows with Rescale

Major Manufacturer Streamlines Its Digital Engineering Workflows with Rescale

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services

Applicable Industries

Automotive

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Manufacturing System Automation
Predictive Maintenance

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration

The Challenge

The global automotive manufacturer was already using multiple HPC cloud services providers to power its digital engineering. However, the company wanted to further streamline its operations by moving its engineering workstations to the cloud. The challenge was to do this without incurring unnecessary costs for idle workstations. Traditional physical workstations were limited in their compute capacity and required significant time to boot up and configure. The company wanted to avoid the costs of cloud compute services when they weren't using the workstations, which was a significant portion of the total time to complete an experiment.

About The Customer

The customer is a global manufacturer in the automotive industry. The company relies heavily on digital engineering to drive its product development efforts. Speed is critical for the company's R&D teams as the faster they can innovate using digital models and sophisticated simulation software, the quicker they can offer new designs to their customers and win contracts to grow their revenues. The company has been a Rescale customer for several years and works with multiple HPC cloud services providers to access the high performance computing (HPC) needed to power its digital engineering. This multi-cloud approach has brought the organization many benefits, including accelerating its product development times dramatically while significantly improving its software licensing management to avoid unnecessary costs.

The Solution

Rescale provided the manufacturer with an easy way to gain the benefits of cloud workstations while minimizing any cloud costs for idle workstations. Rescale offers Elastic Cloud Workstations as a core feature of its platform. This makes it quick and simple for R&D organizations to set up workstations in the cloud for any of their HPC computing needs. Critically, Rescale Elastic Cloud Workstations now offer a new capability that makes it easy for the manufacturer’s R&D teams to “stop” a workstation without losing its current state and configurations. Known as workstation suspension, this unique Rescale feature gives the manufacturer’s R&D teams the ability to turn workstations on and off without disrupting engineering workflows. A user simply has to click a button and an image of the workstation's state is written to a disc. To start up the workstation again only takes about two minutes.

Operational Impact

The manufacturer is now able to virtualize its engineering workstations to capitalize on the intrinsic benefits of the cloud while flexibly managing its virtual workstation to avoid unnecessary costs.
With its workstations fully virtualized, it now seamlessly carries out pre-processing and postprocessing work, as well as easily monitoring HPC jobs to check on progress.
Most importantly, the organization is benefitting from a more efficient use of its most valuable product development resource: its engineers.

Quantitative Benefit

Starting a workstation in the cloud takes at least 30 minutes to boot up and configure. With Rescale's solution, to start up the workstation again only takes about two minutes.