Torbay is a Unitary Authority which is located in the south-west of England and is known as the English Riviera because of its many beaches and mild climate. Torquay, Paignton, and Brixham are the principal towns which make up Torbay.
As a Unitary Authority Torbay Council are the “Lead Local Flood Authority”. Torbay Council’s Engineering section headed up by Dave Stewart and assisted by Mike Wood have considerable experience in building and using hydraulic models and are recognised as one of the leading local authorities in this field.
Torbay Council and Richard Allitt Associates Ltd collaborated on a UKWIR research project on 1D-1D and 1D-2D modelling and so RAA were aware of the capabilities of Torbay Council and this made them ideal candidates to assist RAA in trialing the new rsim service.
Mike migrated his breach models into InfoWorks™ ICM and then using the rsim service he was able to run all seven breach models simultaneously on the dedicated simulation workstations located in the RAA office in the South East of England.
Mike found that with InfoWorks™ ICM the models ran between 1.66 and 12.5 times quicker than in InfoWorks™ CS and he also found that using the rsim service he was able to complete all seven simulations in a single evening rather than seven evenings.
The setup of rsim was very simple and required minimum input from Torbay Council’s IT department. Torbay Council’s IT department had to create a policy within their firewall to allow Mike’s PC to see through the firewall on the required ports to our coordinator. This is not always required and would depend on the individual organisation’s setup.
In addition to the firewall rule RAA required the public IP address of the router at Torbay Council so that a similar rule could be setup on their firewall, and then all Mike needed to do was setup the coordinator address in InfoWorks™ ICM so that his computer could see the simulation agents at RAA. This then allowed Mike to schedule his simulations on any of the available workstations at RAA’s office.

“rsim was easy to use, in fact it didn’t feel any different from scheduling runs locally.  Not only did the simulations run much faster (and simultaneously) the cutting edge remote hardware meant my PC’s performance was not affected.” – Mike Wood, Senior Engineer, Torbay Council

Some of the benefits that Mike and Dave found with using rsim are:
– Multiple Simulations can be run simultaneously
– Faster performance
– Reduced Hardware Costs
– Running remote simulations does not affect local computers performance
– Can be run remotely from any desktop

“Using the rsim has allowed us to undertake hydraulic modelling works in a shorter time scale than was originally anticipated. I would not hesitate to recommend this service”
– Dave Stewart, Service Manager – Engineering, Torbay Council