Swarm Retirement Announcement

Swarm is riding off into the sunset. Long Live ShapeDiver!

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Riding off into the sunset

After years of serving CORE studio and the wider AEC community, it’s time for Swarm to gracefully retire. While we’re sad to see it go, we’re proud of everything it’s achieved and the doors it opened along the way.

It’s been a wild ride

In 2019, McNeel introduced several groundbreaking technologies: Rhino3dm, Rhino.Inside, and Rhino.Compute. Rhino.Compute allowed users to run a headless Rhino instance as a web server, providing geometry backend capabilities to other applications. At the 2019 AECtech hackathon, one of the winning teams built upon this new tech and created RESThopper, which extended Rhino.Compute to solve Grasshopper definitions. Parts of RESThopper were later merged back into the Rhino.Compute repository.

Once the concept of running Grasshopper definitions in the cloud proved viable, CORE studio at Thornton Tomasetti dedicated significant time and resources to developing our own compute platform—Swarm. Over the years, Swarm has provided TT engineers and external AEC users with a fast, convenient way to run Grasshopper definitions on the web.

In September 2020, Swarm merged with ShapeDiver, an online configurator leveraging similar cloud-compute technology. After the merger, CORE studio continued using Swarm internally while gradually transitioning to the ShapeDiver platform.

Now, the time has come to officially bid Swarm farewell.

Cloud compute lives on!

Though Swarm is retiring, cloud-based Grasshopper computation continues to thrive on ShapeDiver—a leading online configurator for parametric designs. Big shout-out to the ShapeDiver team for their fantastic work! If you’re looking to run Grasshopper models in the cloud, we highly recommend checking out ShapeDiver.