The mission of the EU-funded OPERA project is the training of operators in the area of chemical industry by means of flexible and configurable simulation applications running in a cost-effective IT environment. This paper outlines how the problem of real-time combined with the requirement for high performance computing may be solved in a standard environment. The OPERA system provides a way to integrate hybrid simulation models and is highly scalable. It runs both on a single computer and on multi-processor LAN clusters. OPERA results appear to be useful for solving many problems, far beyond the initial requirements in the domain of distributed simulation.