Accelerating Product Engineering with Teamcenter Simulation on AWS

In today’s fast paced competitive manufacturing landscape, organizations continue to increase the adoption of virtual engineering workflows such as engineering simulations to accelerate and optimize their product development process. With growing demand for complex design studies to evaluate key performance indicators such as performance, cost, reliability, manufacturability and assembly, Simulation Process and Data Management (SPDM) is becoming a key system of record that enables organizations manage and integrate simulation data with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems while facilitating interaction and collaboration between cross functional teams, involving product designers, simulation analysts, and manufacturing engineers. However, to address distributed nature of engineering teams spread across the globe, as well as ability to manage infrastructure costs and deliver flexible data movement, modernization of SPDM deployment is critical. In this blog, we discuss how customers can leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure to build a cost effective, secure and scalable SPDM deployment to support product engineering transformation.

Challenges of Managing Simulation Data and Infrastructure Limitations

Industries across the board are facing growing product complexity, driven by the demand to serve diverse markets resulting in multiple product variants and configurations. While digital engineering simulations such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) are widely acknowledged as vital for managing product complexity and enabling efficient product development, the simulation process itself can often become a significant bottleneck. Analysis teams frequently work with obsolete data that is versioned incorrectly or deliver results too late to influence design directions. Domain experts often struggle to match physical test and simulation datasets when performing correlation work. Program managers often lack visibility and are unable to gain insights because computer-aided engineering (CAE) results are only viewable with an analyst’s help. Importantly, when a designer or analyst is unavailable, access to the right data at the right time to make informed business decisions becomes a limiting factor. Moreover, as the number of design variants and the associated simulations performed grows exponentially, there is a danger that teams will get bogged down with the vast amounts of data they generate.

Traditional on-premises deployments compound these issues by struggling to keep up with current security standards, offering limited scalability, and incurring high infrastructure costs. These deployments have fixed capacity limits, and often cannot scale computing resources quickly enough to meet simulation needs, which can result in project delays. Additionally, they often lack robust disaster recovery and backup capabilities, making it challenging to restore data and operations quickly in the event of a system failure.

Teamcenter Simulation

Teamcenter Simulation is a Simulation Processes and Data Management (SPDM) solution designed for engineers and analysts working on engineering workflows. Built on Teamcenter, a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution within the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, this tool enables comprehensive management of simulation and physical testing processes, data, tools, and workflows. It seamlessly integrates with existing product data, providing complete traceability and visibility to all stakeholders. By utilizing Teamcenter Simulation, engineering teams are able to collaborate effectively throughout the digital thread, ensuring a cohesive and efficient product development process.

Connecting Simulation to Product Data

To address the Simulation Data Management challenges, manufacturing companies should manage simulation work as an essential element of their overall PLM strategy. Teamcenter Simulation enables organizations to better manage, understand, and reuse their engineering simulation data and processes, providing greater control and efficiency throughout the product development lifecycle. Since Teamcenter Simulation is an integral module of the Teamcenter platform, you can manage all simulation related data in context with product data such as computer-aided design (CAD), material data, product parameters, product requirements, etc. With Teamcenter on AWS, you get a single source of truth for your entire organization and can connect simulation activities to your organization’s digital thread. This connection is critical for enabling enterprise-level digital thread initiatives such as adopting model-based systems engineering (MBSE) or model-based testing (MBT). The digital thread enables simulation teams to fully support the product lifecycle by using the latest product data as inputs to simulations and providing easy access to key simulation results for all decision makers and stakeholders.

Organizational Benefits of Teamcenter Simulation on AWS

Teamcenter Simulation on AWS can be tailored to meet customer’s SPDM process and infrastructure needs. AWS services help overcome Teamcenter Simulation infrastructure challenges through scalable infrastructure and streaming service, lower operational costs, and robust security and reliability features that surpass traditional on-premises deployments. The following section details the benefits of deploying Teamcenter on AWS, guided by the Well-Architected Framework principles.

Improved Security: Organizations managing on-premises Teamcenter implementations often face challenges in maintaining current security protocols, and encryption standards due to significant costs and employee skillset gap. Moreover, these organizations bear the responsibility of ensuring compliance with evolving standards, which is challenging compared to the robust security and compliance certifications inherently provided by AWS’s continuously updated infrastructure. Also, sensitive Product information such as Requirements, Bill of Materials (BOM), CAD files, Simulation results, and other data managed by Teamcenter can be encrypted both at rest and in transit using AWS services. This ensures confidentiality, consistency and integrity of critical product data.

Improved Reliability: AWS’s multiple Availability Zones within a region ensure high availability and data replication. Deploying Teamcenter Simulation in a high availability architecture provides companies safeguards against both isolated hardware failures and data center outages, ensuring continuous access to critical PLM data and processes. Additionally, AWS’s global network of regions enables organizations to implement disaster recovery strategies with cross-region replication, further enhancing business continuity capabilities and meeting stringent enterprise uptime requirements. In contrast, on-premises deployments often lack this level of reliability due to their vulnerability to hardware failures, power outages, and limited scalability, which can lead to significant downtime and data loss.

Cost Optimization: By deploying Teamcenter on AWS, customers can avoid initial capital expenditures associated with on-premises infrastructure. Instead, they pay only for the compute, storage, streaming, data processing (ML & Analytics) and other resources consumed. This pay-as-you-go model can lead to significant cost savings, particularly for organizations with fluctuating workloads, allowing them to scale resources up or down as needed. Companies can leverage AppStream 2.0 service to stream Teamcenter Simulation client with integration to Simulation software. This approach eliminates the need for engineers to own expensive local workstations and simplifies end user IT hardware and software management.

Performance Efficiency: Customers can optimize performance through customized compute configurations and GPU settings for both Teamcenter and CAE applications. The ability to scale computing resources up or down as needed to ensure optimal performance without overprovisioning is crucial for CAE simulations, which often require significant computational power to run efficiently and speed time-to-results.

Operational Efficiency: AppStream 2.0 offers the ability to create custom images with preconfigured Teamcenter and Simulation applications allowing IT organizations to efficiently manage their end user environments. Additionally, managed services such as Amazon Relational Database Service for Oracle and FSx for NetApp ONTAP offload database and file system management. This helps organizations streamline their IT infrastructure and process allowing Teamcenter administrators to focus on core application management.

Teamcenter Simulation Architecture on AWS

AWS enables Teamcenter implementation in a Highly Available architecture by distributing Web servers, Enterprise servers, FMS servers, Visualization, and Solr servers across multiple Amazon EC2 instances in different Availability Zones. The setup uses Amazon RDS for Oracle as a fully managed commercial database, while Teamcenter volume storage is provisioned using either FSx for NetApp ONTAP or Amazon EFS. A central aspect of this architecture is the integration of Amazon AppStream 2.0, a managed streaming service, allowing delivery of the Teamcenter Simulation client with integration to Simulation software. AppStream 2.0 leverages high-performance NVIDIA GPU-powered instances (such as the Graphics G4dn, G5, and Graphics Pro families) to support the advanced visualization needs required by simulation workloads.

Figure 1: Siemens Teamcenter Simulation Architecture

AWS Marketplace

Seamless access to Siemens Xcelerator portfolio of software and solutions is crucial for successfully implementing Simulation Process and Data Management in day-to-day simulation workflows. The AWS Marketplace offers customers easier discovery, deployment, and management of software that runs on AWS, including purchase of Siemens Xcelerator products. The flexible pricing structure and transparent billing system provided by AWS Marketplace allows IT managers to efficiently oversee software consumption and maintain cost control. For a more comprehensive understanding of the benefits of purchasing Siemens software on AWS Marketplace, refer to the Siemens blog, How AWS Marketplace transforms the buying experience on the cloud.

Conclusion

In summary, Teamcenter Simulation can be deployed either in a customer’s AWS environment or as a SaaS solution through Teamcenter X on AWS. Deploying Teamcenter Simulation software on AWS offers several advantages, such as reduced infrastructure expense, enhanced collaboration, data traceability, improved data integrity, and a modernized SPDM implementation. By utilizing AWS’s cloud native services, organizations can establish a Well-Architected SPDM solution, providing a secure, scalable, and high-performance foundation for managing the product lifecycle.

AWS Marketplace offers a comprehensive range of Siemens Digital Industries Software solutions. Explore the full list of Siemens products available on AWS Marketplace, and visit the official partnership website to learn more about the collaboration between AWS and Siemens.

Special thanks to additional contributors to this blog including:

• Noah Jackson (Global EUC Solutions Architect, AWS)
• Indrakanti Chakravarthy (Director of Marketing – Strategic Programs, Siemens)