What happens in the product development and manufacturing fields at the intersection of simulation, high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) when state-of-the-art tools begin to make inroads? The issue is hyper-interesting at a time when companies are changing the ways in which they design, operate and compete and are now entering a convergence phase with these ingredients as some of the main courses on the menu.

The growing CAE player of recent years, Altair, serves up these interesting dishes.

The fact that simulation-driven design has become an increasingly vital and more common element in PLM and product development work is largely related to the digitalization trend, where digital prototypes have become increasingly common. In addition, advances in High Performance Computing (HPC) and cloud technology have created more space and more efficient handling of the exponentially growing data volumes that characterize both systems and advanced simulation.

The founder and CEO of Altair, James R. Scapa, is unsurprisingly one of the most highly profiled advocates of simulation-driven design. It is natural that he, as head of one of the most proactive CAE companies in recent years, should be at the front line. What makes it particularly interesting is that the company has worked hard to expand, sharpen and integrate its entire suite of simulation software in recent years. This has served to strengthen Altair's position at the point where simulation, High Performance Computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) converge.

All this comes alongside purely commercial growth. The company's Q3 2021 report is symptomatic of the latter, where they raised the midpoint of its full year 2021 total revenue guidance to a range of $515 million to $518 million, or year-over-year growth of 9.6 percent to 10.2 percent.

This is good growth for the company itself, but it is also an indication that Altair operates in a market—the CAE market—where the rate of investment among the world's companies remains very strong, even in spite of the effects of the pandemic. Scapa commented:

“We continue to evolve our product portfolio with a combination of sustaining and disruptive innovations and recently announced the 2022.2 product update,” Scapa commented. “The 2021.2 release of Inspire, our simulation-driven design platform, includes a large number of features, including a Python API, new geometry tools and optimization algorithms for minimizing 3D printing time. SmartWorks 2021.2 is a modern evolution of our desktop tools to harness the power of AI, analytics and the Internet of Things and a cloud-native platform built on the experience we have gained in data analytics and smart product development.”

“Software product revenue for the first nine months of 2021 continued a strong positive trend at 84.7 percent of total revenue compared to 82.6 percent during the first nine months of 2020. Our recurring software license rate remained high at 90 percent for the third quarter of 2021 and 91 percent year-to-date,” he added.

This all indicates a healthy business, and is also mirrored in sound activities on the technology development side.

During the last month alone, we have seen two events illustrating different aspects of Altair’s proactive approach:

• In December, Altair bought World Programming, a British technology company specializing in data analytics software which is used by many of the world's leading companies on Forbes Top 500. This includes companies in manufacturing, telecommunications, energy, financial services, insurance, healthcare, retail and consumer products.
• Moreover, only a week ago Altair also announced a multi-year agreement with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to offer Altair's HPC scheduling and management suite with HPE's HPC system, with the aim of supporting the next generation of supercomputers.

Open Source, Python and SAS

Why would Altair buy World Programming? There are several reasons. World Programming's platform supports development and execution in a single program of multilingual software solutions used in computer science, including Python, R and SAS.

“This acquisition is a significant opportunity to help companies switch to hybrid architectures with modern, open technology and language while we preserve, protect and utilize the best parts of existing technology, such as the language SAS,” asserted Scapa, commenting on the acquisition.

In addition to the technologies, Altair also gains World Programming's customer base of approximately 500 corporate customers worldwide. This holds exciting potential to strengthen Altair's foothold in several industries, as organizations increasingly seek open-source solutions to accelerate their big data initiatives and adopt a more modern and flexible environment. This includes areas such as manufacturing, telecommunications, energy, financial services, insurance, healthcare, retail and consumer products.

But what do languages ​​like Python, R and SAS mean in all this?

Scapa states that World Programming's solutions are very advanced and have proven to be able to help users compile and execute millions of models built with the SAS language, while at the same time adopting modern languages ​​and open-source technology.

“This enables them to respond more quickly to changes in market requirements and to be able to utilize new insights,” said Scapa.

What Do Languages Like Python and SAS Mean?

The answer is: they mean a lot. If we take Python first, it is generally a high-level programming language, designed to be easy to read and easy to implement. It is open source, which means that it is free to use, even for commercial applications. It is used to develop desktop GUI (Graphical User Interface) applications, websites and web applications. The simple syntax rules for the programming language generally make it easier to keep the code base readable and the application maintainable.

Today, Python is used in some of the world's most popular services and programs, such as YouTube, Spotify, Google, Instagram and more.

Python is also rapidly increasing in use, which is likely the reason why Ansys, Altair’s toughest competitor, recently released their PyAnsys program, a family of Python packages providing a new, unified and modern programmable interface linked to the company's proprietary simulation stack. The background here is that Ansys does not belong to the CAE players that are primarily associated with open-source software.

The interesting bottom line of what Altair is doing is also linked to the open-source code, in that there are an increasing number of people working to further develop, improve and expand the language, which means that Python's capacity is increasing daily.

What about SAS? It is a "command-driven" software package used for statistical analysis and data visualization. It is only available for Windows operating systems, and is currently one of the most widely used statistical software packages in both industry and academia. What the future of this language will look like, however, remains to be seen. The growing popularity of Python and R means that these capable tools for data science, statistics and machine learning tend to grow in a way that means other languages—such as SPSS, SAS, STATA—may decrease in importance as competitors to Python.

Powerful And Versatile Platform

That being said, it should be noted that the Altair acquisition includes World Programming's flagship product, WPS Analytics, which has more than two decades of experience behind it and has been developed to meet the increasing use of open-source language. WPS Analytics is a powerful and versatile software platform for scalable data processing and analysis. Several notable features include:

• The ability to run programs written with SAS syntax without having to install third-party products.
• Fully integrated language support for SAS.
• Support for SQL, Python, R and Hadoop, including data exchange capabilities, all in a single application.
• Advanced algorithms for mathematics, statistics and machine learning.
• Ability to access multiple data sources, including big data, clouds and mainframes.
• Can be used standalone or integrated through access control for data and model distribution to APIs on request.
• Flexible distribution for linking locally, to mainframes and to cloud environments.

A Flexible and Intuitive Environment

“Customers want choice and by integrating with Altair—an organization with high trust and a reliable philosophy with open architecture—we give users easy access to technology in a flexible and intuitive environment,” said Oliver Robinson, CEO of World Programming.

“Altair will help accelerate access to our solutions as we allow the modern world's first-class open-source technologies to converge with the opportunities to benefit from decades of investment in SAS,” he added.

World Programming's software will be integrated into Altair's suite of data analytics solutions and will be available through Altair Units, which “gives customers easy access to Altair's entire portfolio of software solutions.”

The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Deal: Next Generation Super Computers

As stated above, one of Altair's special areas of expertise is High Performance Computing, or HPC. Solutions for this are also closely linked to efficient management of the company's extensive portfolio of simulation and analysis software, which makes the connections to sharp HPC solutions crucial.

These pieces are also of great importance as the background to Altair's announcement last week that it has signed a multi-year agreement with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to offer Altair's HPC solution suite for scheduling and management with HPE's HPC system, in order to support the next generation supercomputers.

The solution suite includes Altair PBS Professional, a fast and powerful workload manager, which provides users with robust, scalable technology and can handle the most intensive jobs while improving productivity, optimizing utilization and efficiency and simplifying administration for supercomputers of all sizes.

“Altair and HPE have a strong, almost 20-year relationship rooted in our common desire to offer customers top solutions that will drive the future of supercomputers,” says Sam Mahalingam, technical manager at Altair, in a comment on the agreement.

He further points out that by providing PBS Professional and Altair's other solutions, users are given the opportunity to tackle the world's most demanding local and cloud-related challenges without hassle.

Unlocks Value from Data

With the advent of the exascale era and powerful, specialized HPC systems which require first-class software tools, HPE claims that they offer users access to a complete set of Altair solutions with next-generation HPC systems. This is to support the increasingly complex HPC requirements for modeling, simulation, machine learning, deep learning and multiphysics.

In addition, Altair’s reliable, global technical expertise and support services will be available to HPE customers who have access to the following solutions through the Altair and HPE partnership:

• Altair PBS Professional, a world-class work scheduling solution that meets the needs of any project—from low-throughput tasks to groundbreaking exascale systems such as the Aurora supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.
• Altair Access, which provides a simple, powerful and consistent interface for submitting and monitoring jobs on remote clusters, clouds and other resources, allowing engineers and researchers to focus on core activities and spend less time learning how to run applications and moves around data.
• Altair Grid Engine, a leading distributed resource management system to optimize workloads and resources in thousands of data centers, improve performance and increase productivity and efficiency.
• Altair Control, an easy-to-use web application for monitoring and managing cluster configuration and reporting in an HPC environment.

“HPE offers the world's most comprehensive HPC and AI solutions for solving all computing problems, on any scale, with options for using our solutions as a cloud service through the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform,” said Bill Mannel, VP and general manager of HPC, at HPE. “By continuing our strong and long-term collaboration with Altair, we equip our customers with tools to optimize their resources and focus on unlocking value from their data quickly and efficiently.”

Altair’s 2021 Milestone Events

There were several important milestones in 2021 that illustrate Altair’s proactive ambitions:

• Last February, saw the launch of the 2021 version of the software for designing electronic systems. Among other things, it can simulate 5G connections, performance at the electronic card level, modern manufacturing processes and more.
• An MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) was signed with Rolls-Royce Germany. This is about jointly developing a CAE solution that combines artificial intelligence and aircraft engine technology.
• In March, Flow Simulator was purchased from GE Aviation, an integrated software for the design of flow, heat transfer and combustion solutions and which is used to optimize machine and system design, among others.
• More publicly spectacular was the company's announced investment as a CAE and HPC backbone for the British Aston Martin automotive stable.
• In May, a number of new functionalities and other news was launched on Altair's cloud-based Altair One platform. It is a fully integrated platform that brings together the company's entire range of solutions and HPC capabilities.

“Altair One has a modern, cohesive approach in order to strengthen HPC and cloud resources to run computational science applications anywhere, anytime, on a large scale. This is the key to optimized results and to achieve faster time-to-value,” commented Scapa.

In connection with this, the company also released software updates for flow dynamics (CFD) and expanded functions for the design of electronic systems (EDS, Electronic System Design), among other things.

“The industry's most robust CFD solution, the breadth and depth of which is unparalleled and with which one can effectively handle a wide range of multidisciplinary challenges,” asserted Scapa.

• In June, Altair launched their next generation version of SmartWorks; which is a cloud-based solution that utilizes AI, analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) to help organizations improve and ensure production quality, develop connected product lines, optimize maintenance schedules, and implement recurring revenue models.
• In August, Altair bought S-FRAME Software. The software is a powerful structural analysis and design program that gives Altair a stronger position in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC). The technical capabilities they acquire with this purchase are one thing; another equally important factor is that the AEC segment is estimated to be one of the fastest growing segments in the PLM market with an estimated close to 15 percent share of PLM investments and a value of approximately $11 billion in 2025.

On the bottom line, the picture is clear: the future looks bright for Altair. Simulation is growing in the world of product realization and as a key technology in almost every company’s PLM arsenal. Just as vital is the need for data processing capacity and services that follow in the footsteps of the exponential growth of simulation and analysis data flowing in and out of these sessions. 

I would bet that James R. Scapa and his team at Altair will give Ansys management many sleepless nights in the future.