Core Concepts
This page defines the building blocks you will work with on Rescale: jobs, workflows, workstations, coretypes, software, files, and the accounts and teams that own them. Read it once before you dive into the rest of the docs. Deeper pages for each concept live under their own sections.
Organization, workspaces, and projects
Your Rescale account lives inside an organization. An organization is split into one or more workspaces, each with its own members, policies, software and hardware portfolio, and billing. By default, every organization has a single Default Workspace that all members belong to. Organization administrators can create additional workspaces from the Administration Portal under Teams > Workspaces to match business units, regions, or largely independent engineering teams.
Within a workspace, admins organize people and work using:
- Groups: collections of members managed together.
- Projects: containers that jobs belong to, with budgets assigned at the project level.
- Budgets: spending limits that can be attached to a project or to an individual member.
Workspace Folders are a separate organizational layer on top of jobs and workstations. You use folders to group simulations by product line, component, physics type, or design phase. Folders have three areas: Home (your private space), Shared with me (folders others have shared), and Workspace (the team-shared area).
Jobs
A job is a single simulation run on Rescale. Every job specifies:
- The software application and version to run.
- The command to execute.
- The input files the command consumes.
- The hardware settings, which include a coretype and a core count.
When you submit a job, Rescale provisions an HPC cluster that matches the hardware settings, runs your software, and stores the output files on the job. You can monitor status, stream logs, inspect files mid-run, and connect directly to the cluster while the job is active. A job that runs without user interaction is called a batch job.
Workflows
A workflow is a reusable, multi-step simulation pipeline. A workflow template is a graph of nodes that represent jobs, workstations, storage devices, decision logic, and agents. Template builders configure the graph once in a drag-and-drop canvas. Runners execute the template by supplying only the inputs each run requires. Common node types include:
- Job: runs a simulation or compute task on Rescale hardware.
- Workstation: launches an interactive workstation session for pre- or post-processing.
- Storage Device: makes shared storage available to other nodes so outputs flow to the next step automatically.
- Decision: routes execution based on outputs from upstream steps, for example choosing hardware based on mesh size.
Workflows preserve your team's simulation process in a shareable template so other engineers can run it without rebuilding the pipeline.
Workstations
Elastic Cloud Workstations, often called workstations, are managed cloud virtual desktops. You use them for interactive engineering work like CAD, model preparation, interactive solving, and visualization. Workstations connect to the same Rescale files and software catalog as jobs, support multi-cloud hardware, and render in the browser or a local client through NiceDCV. You can scale the hardware up for heavier interactive work and suspend the workstation, similar to powering down your computer, when you are not using it.
Coretypes and Coretype Collections
A coretype is a specific hardware configuration available on Rescale, typically backed by a particular cloud instance type. When you submit a job or launch a workstation, you pick a coretype and a number of cores.
A Coretype Collection is a curated group of compatible coretypes that appears as a single hardware option during job setup, with a name ending in "Plus" (for example, Elm Plus, Emerald Plus, Starlite Plus). Each Collection is anchored on an entry-point coretype that sets the baseline performance and resources. When you choose a Collection, your core count is locked and Rescale may run the job on any underlying coretype that meets or exceeds the baseline, at no additional per-core compute price. Licensing follows your existing contracts and the job configuration, independent of whether you pick a single coretype or a Collection.
Software and licensing
Rescale's software catalog contains more than a thousand engineering applications. Each application has one or more versions and, internally, a software tile that registers it in the catalog. When you set up a job, you pick a software tile, a version, and a command.
You can run software under several licensing models:
- On-demand licensing (ODL): Rescale provides the license as part of the software charge, billed per use.
- Bring Your Own License (BYOL): you use a license you already own, delivered to the cluster through one of Rescale's licensing services.
- License Host and Company License Proxy (CLP): Rescale licensing services that connect a running job or workstation to your license server.
Rescale Software Publisher lets admins bring custom, proprietary, commercial, or open-source software to the platform. Admins register a software tile, then publish versions from a sandbox, a temporary isolated environment where they install and test the software before making it available to other users. Self-published software is portable across coretypes and cloud regions, and behaves like the rest of the Rescale catalog in the UI.
Files and storage
Every job has its own file area for inputs, in-run working files, and outputs. You upload input files when you submit the job and download results when it finishes. Beyond per-job files, Rescale offers shared storage options for data that persists across jobs:
- Workspace storage: files available to members of a workspace.
- Rescale Cloud Filesystem (CFS): a centralized, persistent, high-performance filesystem that attaches to jobs and workstations like a network drive. CFS is designed as a single source of truth for data shared across users in a workspace. It is currently a beta product. Contact your account representative to enable it.
Storage devices can also appear as nodes in a workflow so that output files from one step are available to the next without manual transfer.
Metadata: tags and custom fields
Tags are free-form labels on jobs, files, and workstations, searchable with boolean logic. Custom fields are typed key-value data on jobs, which an admin can make required. The difference being that tags help you find things and custom fields prove things were captured.
Together they're what Rescale calls Metadata Management. See Tags & Custom Fields.
Administration, policies, and firewalls
Organization and workspace administrators use the Administration Portal to manage members, groups, projects, budgets, software and hardware portfolios, and policies. For customers with strict network requirements, Rescale offers Compute Network Application Firewalls (CNAFs), which restrict network traffic between compute regions and the outside world while still allowing access to Rescale storage and licensing services.
Platform regions and sign-in URLs
Rescale runs several independent production platforms, separated by geography and by compliance regime. Your organization is hosted on exactly one of them, and that platform is where you sign in, submit work, and store files.
Regional platforms do not share data. Jobs, files, workspaces, and members exist on one platform only, so a colleague on a different platform cannot see your work, and moving between them is a migration rather than a login change.
Documentation examples use platform.rescale.com because it is the most common. If your
organization is on another platform, substitute its URL. If you are not sure which one you
use, check the address bar when you sign in, or ask your Rescale Solutions Architect or
Customer Success contact.
Some capabilities differ by platform. CNAFs, for example, are not offered on the high-compliance platforms (FedRAMP and IL5), and support tickets from ITAR and FedRAMP environments route through a separate portal. Pages that carry a platform-specific restriction say so where the restriction applies.
Where to go next
- Ready to submit something? See Your first job.
- Looking up a specific term? See the Glossary.
- Want the platform tour? See the Overview.