Virtual machines let design engineers join the work from anywhere revolution.
The digital transformation has been uneven. While cloud and hybrid models have changed the face of work for many, professionals who rely on high-performance, graphics-accelerated workstations in product design and manufacturing fields haven’t been able to migrate workloads to the cloud with as much ease.
It could now get a bit easier, with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud G4ad instances now certified for Autodesk Inventor. Amazon hopes this will grant design engineers using Inventor the freedom to work in the cloud confidently.
Certified for Inventor
Amazon Web Services bills its EC2 G4ad instances as the most cost-effective and versatile virtual computer for deploying machine learning models like image classification, object detection and speech recognition. It’s also a powerful tool for graphics-intensive applications like graphics workstations, game streaming and graphics rendering.
The G4 instances are available for both NVIDIA GPUs (G4dn) and AMD GPUs (G4ad). They are powered by the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs, geared to accelerate the design and engineering process from 2D/3D drawings and 3D modeling to rendering and simulation.
The latest Autodesk Inventor certification comes in the wake of AWS’s release of five new instance types for Amazon EC2, boasting more compute instance types than any other cloud provider. This includes cost-optimized instances from AMD processors and the most powerful GPU instances from NVIDIA, featuring up to 400 Gbps in networking performance. Additionally, the suite of five Amazon EC2 G4ad instances of varying sizes gives businesses options based on their employees’ remote workstation needs. The goal is to equip design professionals with the best tools available without being tethered to anchored-in-place, on-site desktop workstations.
“The high-performance capabilities of the AMD EPYC CPUs and Radeon Pro GPUs are enabling AWS to create a new graphics-focused instance that help us keep our leadership price/performance offerings that our customers expect,” said David Brown, AWS Vice President, Amazon EC2. “We’re delighted to continue this great collaboration with AMD, enabling the Amazon EC2 G4ad instances to provide the industry’s best price-performance for graphics-intensive applications.”
High Performance Remote Graphics
Perhaps the most salient benefit of the Autodesk certification is that it gives design professionals assurance that their cloud instance workflows, simulations and tool creation pipelines to the cloud will have the same degree of reliability, support and performance as a physical workstation. An added benefit is that a single click in Inventor can harness the Radeon PRO V520 GPU built into the EC2 G4ad. This feature allows users to access the high-performance AMD Radeon Pro-Render plug-in for Inventor that aims to provide photorealistic and high-quality render regardless of the device used or location.
As design engineers typically work with large data sets, working in the cloud helps with collaboration and security because the data stays in the cloud without being frequently distributed or synchronized. When working in G4ad instances using Autodesk Inventor, users benefit from integration with Autodesk Vault data management software that helps track the workflow process and ensure that all team members use the same versions of data sets. Using Autodesk Inventor on G4ad instances comes with the promise of greater collaboration and efficiency compared to teams working on local workstations while still maintaining the same degree of design prowess.
“Whether your organization has been all-in on the cloud since day one or is just beginning to move workloads to the cloud, all customers want to optimize for price performance,” said Brown. “As customers bring more and more workloads to the cloud, AWS continues to expand the industry’s leading compute portfolio to meet their increasingly diverse needs.”
