OREANDA-NEWS. T-Systems and the engineering firm hhpberlin, a fire protection specialist, are providing business users world-wide with scalable computing capacities for complex fire simulations and evaluations via an Internet browser. The T Systems subsidiary Multimedia Solutions (MMS) has established a solution based on Microsoft Windows Azure and operates it for the engineering firm. hhpberlin contributes its own expertise to the Cloud service and will in future also offer it to other fire protection companies. These companies will no longer have to invest in their own, expensive, high-performance computers.

T-Systems MMS has made the internationally tried-and-tested “Fire Dynamics Simulator” (FDS) open source simulation software Cloud-capable. A technology, which is also used in elaborate Hollywood film productions, is used: a software framework from Greenbutton for managing high-performance computing applications in the Cloud. For example, this technology is used by the twelve-time Oscar-winning animated film production company Pixar to operate its rendering program as a Cloud service.

The experts from Dresden keep the application and the entire technical infrastructure in the data center continuously up-to-date. At the same time, hhpberlin ensures compliance with country-specific fire protection standards. This means that business users of the Cloud solution no longer need to concern themselves with technical questions. They can concentrate on creating qualified reports with professional tools.

Run several fire scenarios in parallel
“With shared resources, the continuously rising demand for high-performance computing in fire protection can be covered cheaply and flexibly,” said Stefan Truthдn, CEO of hhpberlin. The fire protection engineers configure their information in the portal, calculate the respective fire spread and load the result back onto the PC. Interactive diagrams illustrate the analysis more simply than the Excel spreadsheets commonly used in the industry to date. For the first time, several fire scenarios can be run in parallel without causing your own IT to crash. The program can also calculate different consequences of a fire simultaneously. In addition, even during a simulation, data can be analyzed in real time, including on the go using smartphones and tablets. Each month, the users receive a list of the used and chargeable resources. These include not only computing power and storage space, but also the respective simulation tools used.