Enterprises that need to run large spatial simulations and predict real-world outcomes for complex scenarios like citywide traffic flows need significant computing horsepower. At its annual re:Invent conference Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched a new managed compute service designed to support such large-scale simulations by using multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to manage the underlying compute, memory, and networking requirements.
Dubbed AWS SimSpace Weaver, the service allows enterprises to build simulations without worrying about infrastructure, since setting up a complex spatial simulation across compute instances can be a difficult task, the company said.
“Previously, if a customer wanted to scale up their spatial simulation, they had to balance the accuracy of the simulation with the capacity of their hardware, which limited the usefulness of what they could learn,” said Bill Vass, vice president of technology at AWS, in a company announcement.
The service is targeted at enterprises and organizations that are trying to deploy simulations with more than a million data points—for example, crowd flows across multiple venues in a city.
The simulations allow organizations to predict real-life outcomes before actual deployment of applications, thereby saving time and effort, AWS said.
In order to start using the service, enterprises have to first download the AWS SimSpace Weaver SDK and then integrate AWS SimSpace Weaver APIs with their own simulation code using the downloaded SDK.
After that, enterprises have to upload their application to AWS and deploy the simulation across multiple servers before connecting a client application to visualize and interact with the simulation, the company said.
The new service provides a local development environment for enterprises to iterate and test a version of their spatial simulation on their personal hardware, without paying a fee, before running their simulation at scale on AWS.
The local environment uses the same APIs as AWS SimSpace Weaver and this means that enterprises can transition their simulation to the cloud without modifying any code, AWS said.
AWS SimSpace Weaver has been made generally available across US East (Ohio), US East (North Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), and Europe (Stockholm) regions. Availability in other regions is expected to follow soon.