L2.

The Challenge.

L2 is the market leader in fire consulting, practical fire engineering, and accident risk management in Finland. One part of their service offering is the creation of fire safety plans for places such as public buildings, shopping malls, and government offices.

Before moving to the cloud, L2 had been running simulations with high power workstations that were located in areas within their office, leading to barriers of scale and performance. Furthermore, the workstations also needed to be run 24/7 during simulations, which could last several weeks.

The Solution.

The solution was built on two phases using AWS. In the first phase Nordcloud set up a cloud environment with easy to launch simulation machines, limitless capacity, and the ability to allocate capacity costs to each project.

In the second phase simulations were automated; L2’s fire safety consultants could upload a 3D model and identify budgets, after which Nordcloud’s automated solution would build the environment, run the job, save results, notify the consultant, and then stop the environment.

The solution to provide capacity for HPC simulations was built using EC2 and S3. Nordcloud used EC2 to deliver the resizable and scalable compute capacity that L2 were looking for, whilst S3 provided the secure, durable, and highly-scalable storage.

The results.

Now that L2 use an AWS cloud solution their projects, both in terms of size and number, are not limited by hardware. They can also choose the amount of CPU capacity and memory based on the simulation. As a result of the project, 100% of in-house HPC capacity has been removed.