LARSA's mission is to provide our clients with the best combination of structural and earthquake engineering software and services, customized and integrated into our clients' changing engineering needs. The mode in which we develop our software is aimed to allow us to respond to our clients' needs more quickly and effectively. Through better programming, extensive support tools, user training, and community interaction we hope to educate our user base on the latest in engineering methodologies.

The LARSA structural analysis engine has been in commercial use for over 25 years. It was originally developed to perform nonlinear static analysis of structures that have large displacements such as suspension and cable stayed bridges and guyed towers. The engine became popular for analyses of these types of structures because of its unprecedented accuracy at a reasonable price. The engine has been powerful since day one, using both tangent stiffness and the full Newton-Raphson method with iterations. LARSA has come a long way since it was first available on the VAX super-mini computers decades ago.

In 1986, LARSA expanded its engine to meet the needs of any structural analysis that a practicing engineer might find at that time, including seismic analysis and design. At the same time, a graphical user interface was released for DOS. LARSA was the first to offer an individual PC-based DOS structural analysis package with geometric nonlinear analysis capabilities.

LARSA again led the industry in 1994 by taking the next step to Microsoft Windows. That year LARSA introduced its 16-bit Windows 3.x version of the software with a point and click graphical user interface. In 1996, LARSA was the first to offer elastic/perfectly plastic pushover analysis.

In 2001, LARSA released the 6th version of its product, LARSA 2000/4th Dimension, with an all-new, powerful user interface and an engine with unmatched analytical features. LARSA was again the first software in its class to offer Sparse Solver technology, which decreased analysis time by a factor of 30. New analytical features included influence line based moving load analysis, staged construction analysis, time dependent construction analysis, hysteretic and seismic elements, and progressive collapse.

LARSA 4D v7.0 was released in 2006, a major upgrade to LARSA 2000/4D including new support for analysis scenarios within staged construction analysis, influence surfaces, bridge path coordinate systems, the LARSA Section Composer, and much more. LARSA 4D eliminates the need for engineers to use specialized software for each aspect of a project by integrating many analysis types into one comprehensive, multipurpose program.

Let LARSA 4D take your projects into the next dimension.