I've been working on a personal project for a while now (since around Christmas) that has been up and stable since late February called Beotorch. In a tl;dr nutshell, Beotorch is an online SimulationCraft frontend that allows you to queue up and simulate your character on my hardware, completely for free. Today, with the launch of the Legion Prepatch, I have also updated Beotorch for the prepatch and it is now using the Legion development branch of SimulationCraft. I update the build being used at least nightly (more frequently right now) so it is always up to date with the latest bug fixes and APL improvements.
For those who don't know me, I'm a SimulationCraft developer, mostly focused on the Shadow Priest module. I also leverage SimulationCraft heavily for my own Shadow theorycrafting. One of the reasons why I have so much computational power available is because I need to use it in bursts (around patches), but the rest of the time it sits largely idle. Coupling that with needing a way to run my own sims across multiple boxes, I decided to build out Beotorch to help with this. I'll spare you the gory details, but I do have an FAQ available on the site.
From the FAQ, a little more on why I decided to create Beotorch:
I'm interested in hearing from people how they like/dislike the site, what features they'd like to see added, and just feedback in general! Cheers!Why create Beotorch?
There are many reasons why I decided to create Beotorch. A few of the largest include:
- There is a barrier to entry in using SimulationCraft successfully. These barriers vary from user to user, but usually include some of the following: not understanding how to use SimulationCraft, SimulationCraft not being supported on their OS anymore (RIP 32bit Windows users), having an outdated version of SimulationCraft and not knowing it, lacking processing power to do longer simulations (i.e.: stat weights), or not being able to easily share the results of their simulations. Beotorch alleviates all of these concerns. This isn't to say that people will not find value from running SimulationCraft on their own machines, rather that Beotorch makes it easier to accomplish the most common use cases of SimulationCraft.
- I have a lot of extra processing power that is sitting around unused most of the time.
- I do massive simulation runs for my own theorycrafting. Up until this point it has largely been done by hand or with kludgy scripts that were prone to breakage. Beotorch gives me a framework to be able to queue up my own simulations fairly easily, there by reducing the overhead required for me to do my massive simualtion runs.
- Finally, related to the last two points, I want to try and make this simulating platform available to other class theorycrafters so that they can do more detailed analysis of their own. This isn't in place yet, but hopefully SoonTM.