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Sunnyvale, Calif. —Oct. 2, 2013—CliQr Technologies, a leading cloud application management platform enabling businesses to move, manage and secure applications from any physical, virtual or cloud environment to any private, public or hybrid cloud, today announced that Pratt Miller Engineering has successfully implemented its CloudCenter solution to simulate high performance street cars, race cars and tracks to predict lap times faster, more efficiently and with higher accuracy. Pratt Miller Engineering, a full service engineering company, is a well-recognized name in racing circles with victories in American Le Mans series, SCCA Pro Racing World Challenge, NASCAR, IndyCar and the GRAND-AM series. The company provides design, development, construction and at-the-track engineering support to racecar makers like Corvette, Cadillac, and Chevrolet.
Prior to deploying CliQr CloudCenter™, Pratt Miller was faced with the challenge of insufficient compute resources that reduced their ability to run simulations, costing them valuable time and potentially a race. One of Pratt Miller’s key software products is a Windows-based vehicle simulation called Pratt Miller Lap Time Simulation (PM-LTS), which gives their clients a dynamic “13 Degrees of Freedom” vehicle model to predict lap times. The software accepts input parameters for all aspects of the vehicle and race track being simulated including vehicle information such as tires, brakes, suspension, engine and drive train; and race track details including elevation, banking, friction, cornering and atmospheric conditions. Using these variables, Pratt and Miller ran simulations on a single machine, with each simulation often exceeding an hour to complete, and if multiple iterations were required, the run time increased to days. Ultimately these simulations became a design bottleneck, forcing Pratt Miller to reduce the amount of design analysis while also necessitating they pass over additional projects or markets of interest due to the inability to compress the design schedule. To address this issue, Pratt Miller concluded they needed to parallelize their simulations across multiple machines by leveraging the power of and scalability of the cloud. The company also wanted a solution that integrated the PM-LTS application to the public cloud without any recoding or re-architecting.
“Cloud computing is a game changer for technical computing—it enables any size simulation to be completed in mere hours compared to what would have taken us several days in the past,” said Chris Morgan, senior systems engineer, Pratt Miller Engineering. “CliQr lets us harness the enormous compute power of the cloud from our native user interface without forcing our users to become cloud computing experts. By programmatically benchmarking different clouds for price and performance, CloudCenter also makes it easy for us to identify the cloud provider that best meets our needs based on our simulation requirements.”
“Helping companies like Pratt Miller realize the promise of the cloud has always been CliQr’s mission. The CloudCenter platform allows companies to take advantage of the cloud infrastructure in a way that that is unprecedented in the industry,” said Basab Pradhan, president and CEO of CliQr Technologies. “The solution helps companies move, manage and secure their applications on the cloud with the click of a few buttons, without the complex migration or re-coding previously required. We are thrilled that Pratt Miller is now able to capitalize on the elasticity of the cloud giving them the resources to pursue other markets and projects.”
“Although the cloud computing market has matured significantly in recent years, we have yet to realize the promise of universal cloud computing for enterprises, where workloads can be moved between clouds as market prices and service quality fluctuate between the cloud providers,” said Paul Burns, President of Neovise, a cloud computing research firm. “CliQr has developed a solution to the workload portability issue that plagues the cloud computing market and the CloudCenter platform represents a significant advance in making the ethos of cloud computing more attainable.”
CliQr’s CloudCenter is a cloud application management platform, providing Pratt Miller with most of the functionality they asked for out of the box. CloudCenter’s unique profiling templates allow quick migration of a variety of application classes including simulation and other high-performance computing applications. Using CliQr’s command line interface to the CloudCenter, Pratt Miller was able to transfer simulation files from local machines to cloud storage options and invoke the simulation workflow in the cloud without any changes to the desktop GUI. The platform also allows Pratt Miller to benchmark their application and then run simulations without modification, at any time, and on any public cloud provider based on the lowest price, the best performance or the best overall price/performance value.
With the CliQr platform, Pratt Miller was able to increase processing power anywhere from two to hundreds of times with no changes to the PM-LTS application. In the past Pratt Miller users ran simulations on a single multi-core machine and a base simulation model took one hour to run and 200 iterations typically took multiple days. But with CliQr, users are now able to run iterations in parallel, enabling 200 iterations to run in about 1.5 hours.
About CliQr Technologies
CliQr Technologies is a leading provider of cloud-application management solutions, enabling businesses to quickly and efficiently move, manage, and secure applications from any on-premise physical or private cloud environment onto any private, public, or hybrid cloud without the need for a costly and complex migration. Unlike other approaches to cloud migration and runtime management, CliQr’s innovative CloudCenter™ enables businesses to on-board once and run anywhere by decoupling a business’ application from the complexity of the underlying cloud infrastructure without scripting, recoding of applications or creating virtual machine images. Once on-boarded, CliQr enables applications to be benchmarked across any cloud or cloud configuration, optimizing price-performance by ensuring the application is running on the best cloud environment possible. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., CliQr Technologies is backed by Foundation Capital and Google Ventures. For additional information, please visit
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