Cloud calibration
SWAT+ calibration and validation on AWS EC2
Dedicated EC2 per job — parallel MMPSO, live dashboard progress, auto-terminate when results sync.
On every plan, paid from your calibration credit. · Access & allocations
Workflow & model
Toggle the stages to compose your run — sensitivity, calibration, validation.
Streamflow coverage
Choose which gauge stations feed the objective, and place the calibration and validation windows on the years you want.
Parameters
Each row is one knob the search can turn, with its range, the operation applied, and the physical bounds it is clamped to.
Compute
Pick an optimization profile, or fine-tune the pool, iterations, initial samples and stopping patience.
Review & launch
Confirm the decisions from steps 1–4. Nothing executes until you launch.
Watch: cloud calibration in about a minute
FAQ
What AWS instance does SWATGenX use for calibration?
A spot c7i.8xlarge (32 vCPU / 64 GiB, Sapphire Rapids) by default. Larger swarms or big basins can use c7i.16xlarge (64 vCPU) or c7i.48xlarge (192 vCPU). Each calibration job gets its own dedicated instance — not a shared queue.
Does SWATGenX use spot or on-demand instances?
Both — chosen automatically from the estimated run length. Jobs that finish in under about an hour run on low-cost interruptible spot. Longer jobs run on a dedicated on-demand instance that AWS cannot reclaim mid-run, so a multi-hour calibration completes through validation instead of being interrupted partway. If a short spot job is reclaimed mid-run, SWATGenX automatically relaunches it on a non-reclaimable on-demand instance, warm-started from the last saved iteration, so the run still finishes. Either way the instance auto-terminates the moment results are fetched, so there is no idle compute.
How long does a calibration take on AWS?
Roughly 15-20 minutes for a small basin, a few hours for a mid-size model, and up to ~1 day for the largest continental basins on a single 32-core instance. Wall time scales with HRU and channel count, the calibration window, and the swarm size; bigger swarms or instances finish large basins faster.
Can I watch the calibration live and stop it myself?
Yes. While it runs, your dashboard shows its live progress: the iteration, the share complete and the time left. When it finishes, the dashboard shows how the swarm converged. You can stop the run at any point; SWATGenX keeps the best parameters found so far and shuts the instance down.
Do I have to manage any AWS infrastructure?
No. SWATGenX bundles your model with the pinned SWAT+ engine, launches the instance, runs the PSO swarm, streams live progress to your dashboard, fetches the results, and terminates the machine automatically — you only see the calibrated parameters, metrics and hydrographs.
Is cloud calibration available now?
Yes, on every plan: calibration and validation run on cloud compute, paid from your calibration credit, from the Calibration & Validation page, which shows the estimate before launch.
Next steps
Last updated 2026-08-08.