Case Study: Holmes Group achieves faster, more cost-effective fire simulations with Microsoft Azure Batch

Fire safety engineering firm ignites simulation speeds with Azure Batch

Holmes Group, through its subsidiary Holmes Fire, needed a faster, more cost-effective way to run complex fire dynamics simulations for building design. Using Microsoft Azure and Azure Batch, the team wanted scalable high-performance computing to reduce long waits, support more simulation iterations, and improve fire safety analysis for customers.

Microsoft Azure, implemented with Theta, provided an on-demand environment using Azure App Service Web Apps, Azure Active Directory, Azure Blob storage, and Azure Batch for HPC processing. The result was a major speedup: a model that previously took 336 hours in New Zealand ran in 56 hours on Azure, an improvement of more than 400%, while also increasing scalability, collaboration, and overall productivity.

Holmes Group

Sebastian Herrmann

Technology Transformation Director