One thing common between SIMULIA roles of 3DExperience platform and the standalone Abaqus products is that both require an Abaqus solver to perform computations. It further means that both solutions require Abaqus tokens to complete or speed up the computation part of the simulation. For standalone abaqus product, we know that the calculation is straight forward. Abaqus requires a minimum of five tokens to execute a single core non-linear job. Large models require more number of cores to solve in real time and more number of cores require more tokens as follows:

The computation capacity of 3D Experience platform, however, cannot be defined by a single equation. Unlike Abaqus solver, that is available as an integrated all-in-one license for all types of simulations such as standard, CFD, explicit etc., 3D Experience offerings are in form of roles. Each role is a sellable license that includes either some or all Abaqus solver capabilities. Offers are made further flexible by on premise vs. on cloud offerings. Let’s have a look at solver offerings in different configurations and roles.

    Engineer role vs. Analyst role

While most of design engineer roles have embedded Abaqus tokens, most of the analyst roles do not have any compute capacity at all. The number of tokens embedded in designer role depends on the level of simulation complexity a role can accommodate. For example

Stress Engineer role has 8 embedded tokens to accommodate up-to 4 cores job

Structural analysis engineer role has 12 embedded tokens to accommodate up-to 8 cores job

It is possible to submit jobs on more number of cores than what embedded solver permits but in that situation external tokens need to be utilized and embedded solver takes no credit at all.

                Tokens vs. Credits

In case of analyst roles such as stress analyst, fluid mechanics analyst etc., the role itself does not have any compute capacity which should be procured either in the form of tokens or credits. Tokens are renewable form of compute capacity which means they can be used over and over. 3D Experience uses tokens in a very similar fashion as does standalone Abaqus. The token consumption with respect to number of cores is the same for Abaqus as for 3D Experience platform. On the contrary credits are a non-renewable form of compute power. It means that credits, just like the talk time over phone, can be consumed only once.

               Why credits at all!!!

In general credits is an expensive preposition for customer but there are exceptions. Credits are utilized to meet unexpected and rare increase in peak usage. This is somewhat more common in engineering consulting firms that can face high demand of simulation capacity due to influx of many short duration simulation projects at any time. To meet this sudden spike in demand, one-time credit bundle offering makes more sense than increase in perpetual tokens. Once peak demand is over and credits are consumed, simulation capacity is returned to normal levels.

On premise vs. on cloud

Design engineer as well as analyst roles are available in on premise as well as on cloud formats. There are three ways of utilizing cloud resources: store the models on cloud, stores the results on cloud and solve on cloud. The first two offerings require only cloud storage and are available at no additional charge with cloud based license. However, the third offering requires cloud compute resources that consumes compute credits in addition to cloud based license.

Need to know more about SIMULIA 3D Experience platform compute capacity! Please approach us and we are ready to help.