The principal objective of Fortissimo was to enable European manufacturing, particularly small to medium enterprises (SMEs), to benefit from the efficiency and competitive advantage inherent in the use of simulation.
Generally, large companies, which have a greater pool of skills and resources, find access to advanced simulation easier than SMEs which can neither afford expensive High Performance Computing equipment nor the licensing cost for the relevant tools. Fortissimo aimed to overcome this impasse by providing simulation software on cloud infrastructure on a pay-per-use system.
The Fortissimo Marketplace now provides one-stop, pay-per-use, on-demand access to advanced simulation, modelling and data analytics resources including software, hardware and expertise.
IES' role was to develop a dynamic simulation modelling masterplanning tool for cities. The tool relies on the existence of HPC cloud based simulation as a result of the depth of information associated with multiple buildings and their interaction within the urban context.
IES worked together with the University of Edinburgh to identify a cloud based solution which would allow the IESVE simulation environment to handle larger and more complex models and perform more intricate calculations .