SimOps 2.0

SimOps is the community framework for simulation operations. Its 20 best practices were distilled from more than 230 engineering simulation projects and 160 case studies over twelve years, and they are grouped into three lenses that SimOps insists must work together: technology, process and people.

Around the framework sits a full ecosystem: training and certification paths from Fundamentals to Expert, a Technical Advisory Council, a practitioner community and a growing software stack. Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee spoke about SimOps and its importance for the HPC community at SC24, and Peter Ungaro, former CEO of Cray, describes it as the path to better simulation capability, much as DevOps was for software development.

Being SimOps Compliance certified means a tool’s features and capabilities were compared against those 20 best practices, and the result is published on SimOps’ own site. Both of NI SP’s core solutions now have their full assessment there, and SimOps offers a 25-page analysis report on request for each.

EF Portal: THE enterprise HPC PORTAL, rated High on 19 of 20 practices

EF Portal is the engineering access and HPC operations layer for Enterprise: one browser-based environment for engineers, schedulers, data, remote visualization and administration.

SimOps rates it High on 19 of the 20 best practices. Five of them show what that means for an IT team:

SimOps best practice	What it means in practice for Enterprise HPC
Self-service simulation access	Engineers submit Ansys, Star-CCM+, MATLAB and OpenFOAM jobs from the browser through pre-configured templates, with no command line or scheduler expertise needed
End-to-end workflow automation	Job dependencies, reservations, a REST API, a Python CLI and CI/CD integration are built in
License and hardware utilization	GPU, cores, wall time and license slots visible live. SimOps names this one of the portal’s strongest contributions
Hybrid and cloud HPC	One portal across Slurm, HPC Gridware, PBS and LSF, with cloud bursting when local capacity runs out
Data governance and security	Role-based access, MFA, enterprise identity integration and a secure web proxy

DCV: the remote desktop, assessed where an access layer matters most

SimOps assesses DCV as the high-performance access and visualization layer of an HPC environment, and it rates it High on 11 best practices.

Security is one of them: pixel-only streaming keeps geometry and results on the governed server, streams are encrypted with AES-256/TLS, and WebAuthn supports FIDO2 authenticators such as YubiKey and Windows Hello.

User-experience monitoring is another, and SimOps calls it one of DCV’s strongest areas: frame rate, bandwidth, latency and GPU metrics are visible while engineers work.

Hybrid operation matters just as much: DCV delivers the same remote experience on premises, on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and across high-latency links. GPU sharing runs 10 to 15 concurrent full-performance 3D sessions per GPU on Linux.

Built on 20+ years of development, used in enterprise production

A certification measures capabilities, and Enterprise adoption shows whether those capabilities survive real engineering work. Both products carry more than 20 years of development: EF Portal is the evolution of EnginFrame, and DCV traces back just as far.

They both run daily in thousands of output-critical environments all around the world: 5 of the 10 Formula 1 teams use EF Portal, and engineers at Volkswagen, LG and Electrolux use DCV and the portal for their engineering and simulation work.

TRY BOTH SOLUTIONS AGAINST YOUR OWN REQUIREMENTS

The full practice-by-practice ratings are on the SimOps pages for EF Portal and DCV. Pick the three practices that matter most to your team, whether that is license utilization, onboarding new engineers or data security, then check them on your own environment. Both products come with a free trial, and on AWS EC2, there is no DCV license to buy, and EF Portal’s license is free: you pay NI SP for support only.