Running the whole test suite available for Code_Aster is an important task to be sure about the quality of the binary, but requires some resources.

Code_Aster contains about 3600 tests, each one coming with its documentation and it is an invaluable source of informations both for beginners and experts.

Actually, more than 3200 tests are passing (the other ones are mainly due to not yet supported features in this version), you can get a detailed report about this in the bitbucket overview page.

In this post we are showing the validation procedure using a Windows Server on Microsoft Azure cloud. Using this service, you can have access to a virtual machine (you will pay based on time and operations such as disk usage and so, the price will vary according to the requested power and resources) inside Microsoft own infrastructure and get a remote screen.

To do so, an account must be created first. You can profit of a free trial including an initial credit of 170 €. Running the whole suite of Code_Aster will cost something about 4 € (a whole day of a virtual machine running continously).

This kind of application is perfect for cloud systems : since you will only need the machine from time to time (let’s say, each time a new release must be validated) and you would like to test on different architecture (i.e. Windows 7, Windows 10, …) it would be costly to just keep the resources around the rest of the time.

Also, you can benefit of a variable calculation power : if you want your results sooner, you can simply reserve a more powerful machine. You can run the calculation at the same time on multiple machines and, even if you already have an available windows system, you might consider doing it on the cloud : it is better to test on a fresh Windows system with nothing installed yet and you usually do not want to leave your system alone for days during tests.

First of all, one must choose the virtual machine based on requested power, in this case a 4 cores Windows Server 2016 :

In this phase, you can also ask for programs to be pre-installed in the system, we always like to have Nodepad++ available to change configuration files.

After confirmation, your machine will be created. This will take a minute or so, you can follow the procedure in the Azure portal site. You can also configure things such as auto shutdown in case you forget to stop it afterwards.

When everything is ready (you will see a “Running” message), the page will show a DNS address that will allow you to connect to the remote system.

Now the real fun begins : you have an address and port and you are able to remotely connect to the machine using any RDP client such as, in this case, Remmina.

Since the connection is secured, you will be asked to accept the server certificate.

Once inside the Windows Server, you can simply download our Code_Aster for Windows as usual and then extract the archive somewhere :

Since we want to run tests, we will need to create a “testing” link, a script is provided to do so :

Now, it is simply a matter of running tests from the command line, using the “as_run” command and the “run_tests.export” configuration file inside the “astout” directory.

Here we must… wait 🙂 The full tests will require almost 7 hours on this kind of virtual machines. Of course, you can get much more powerful ones in Microsoft Azure. They are more expensive, but you will use them for a shorter time…You can have a look at resource usage by looking at the Task Manager.

And then, finally, the results. Most of the tests, as expected, are passing.