One token for all your simulations- Is it too good to be true?

Where the time goes

A structural run finishes and the results have to reach the fluids team. They work in another tool, on another license pool, in another data environment. Someone writes an export, someone else imports it, and an afternoon goes into checking that nothing was lost on the way across.

The same handover repeats for electromagnetics, acoustics and multibody dynamics. Each one arrives with its own solver tokens, its own interface licenses and its own queue. The license line on the budget is the visible cost. The larger cost is the dead time between the steps, and the scripts holding the pipeline together until the next version of one tool breaks them. Whole physics domains stay unopened, because opening one starts with a purchase that waits months for approval.

Compute is bought per discipline, so one team queues while another team's licenses sit idle. That is what unified licensing was built to remove.

One pool of solver tokens runs every SIMULIA solver

The rest of this article is what that changes in a working week.

Traditional licensing next to unified licensing

A team running structural, electromagnetic and fluid work under the traditional model keeps three token pools, three renewal dates and three budget lines. The table puts the same team under each model.

What sits in the token pool

The breadth is the substance of the offer. Most of these lead their own field.

• Abaqus, linear and nonlinear finite element analysis, with fe-safe for durability and fatigue and Tosca for topology and shape optimization. Runs on CPU and on GPU.
• Simpack, multibody dynamics for rail, drivetrains, wind turbines and aerospace mechanisms. Loads, vibration and fatigue, including hardware in the loop and real time.
• CST Studio Suite, electromagnetics from power electronics up to antenna and radar work, coupled with thermal and structural effects.
• PowerFLOW, meshless Lattice-Boltzmann for aeroacoustics and for flows a mesh struggles with.
• Wave6, acoustics and vibration across the audible range, with finite elements, boundary elements and statistical energy analysis in one engine.
• Isight, automation of the runs themselves, design of experiments and optimization around any solver.
• Tosca Structure, topology, shape and bead optimization driven by the analysis you already run.

Tokens and credits, and when each one applies

Two ways of drawing on the pool, and the difference decides how far it goes.

Solver tokens

Tokens are steady capacity. A job on up to 2 cores holds 15 tokens, and every doubling of the core count adds 10, so 4 cores is 25, 8 cores is 35 and 16 cores is 45. A GPU adds 5, and every doubling of the GPU count adds 5 again. Tokens are checked out while a job runs and checked back in when it ends, so the pool is sized by what runs at the same time, not by how many people have the software installed.

A pool of 100 tokens carries an Abaqus job on 8 cores and a CST Studio Suite job on 32 cores at the same time, with capacity still in hand. Our SRU token calculator does this arithmetic for your own machines.

Solver credits

Credits are prepaid solving power, drawn on demand once the tokens are all out. They cover the weeks when everything lands at once, and they suit the people who run a simulation now and then, where holding tokens all year makes no sense.

The 3DEXPERIENCE® platform

The same pool runs a standalone installation and the platform. The platform adds what standalone cannot: every discipline in one data environment, so boundary conditions and results move between solvers without an export, an import and a validation step in between. That is the idea behind unified modeling and simulation.

Everyone works from the same model through their own app, whether they sit in structures, fluids, manufacturing or design. Process Experience Studio goes one step further and lets a specialist build a web interface for the people who are not specialists. A designer who wants to know what a geometry change does to the flow runs it through that interface, and the setup stays with the person who defined it once.

Does it fit your team

Unified licensing fits when one of these is true.

1. You run more than one simulation domain and the pools go idle at different times.
2. You want to open a new physics domain on a small first commitment.
3. People around the team would run the occasional simulation if getting to the compute were not the hard part.
4. Your multiphysics work depends on moving files between tools by hand.

In any of those you end up with fewer license types, more use out of the compute you already pay for, and a lower step up to the next domain.

Run the numbers for your setup

Tell us what you run today and on what hardware. We map it onto the unified model and show you where the capacity actually goes. A representative comes back to you within 1 business day. Talk to us here.