German distributed TENT engineering simulation environment goes GLOBUS next summerAmsterdam 05 March 2001 Andreas Schreiber from the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) in Cologne offered the attendants of the First Global Grid Forum Conference a brief overview of the TENT distributed simulation system which is used as a problem solving environment for engineering applications. TENT consists of a component system based on CORBA. The TENT applications are wrapped to the components which in turn are interconnected by event channels. In the Summer of 2001, the TENT team plans to integrate the system with the Globus Toolkit to create a grid version of TENT, which will be operational for industrial use.
TENT aims to integrate various simulation programmes and their additional tools into a single aero-elastic simulation work flow environment under a centralised control. Via coupled simulations of complex engineering designs, the project partners from DLR and the German National Research Centre for Information Technology (GMD) are able to solve industrial product design problems in an easy way. The system provides access to distributed computing resources and equally includes on-line visualisation and steering capabilities. A TENT application contains various tools that are encapsulated to form components based on Java, CORBA, Python, and XML.
In his talk, Andreas Schreiber described the TENT architecture as a system which is built on component factories. As such, TENT includes base systems, facilities, components, and application systems, in addition to the name and data servers. The components are objects with a standardised interface and are connected by wires to build the work flows. The front-end has a graphical user interface which is platform independent. The components are easy to connect assuming that the events are compatible meaning that a component knows how to react on an event submitted by another component.
The system has normal and special components. The main components for the computer-based development of a gas turbine for instance, consist of specialised solvers for the differential equations, describing the flow through the different parts of the engine, including the compressor, the combustion chamber, and the turbine. Each of these solvers requires high-performance computers with gigabytes of memory, and a computing power of more than 10 to the tenth floating point operations per second. Additionally, for the analysis of the data, sophisticated visualisation tools are utilised. Many more software tools have to be accessed to prepare the geometry of the gas turbine for the mathematical programmes, as well as to exchange the various data between the components.
The TENT team has already prepared a number of user scenarios for Airbus, DLR, and other industrial partners. The project delivers both scientific codes and commercial tools. Applications have been developed for virtual aircraft design, flight manoeuvres, combustion chambers and the design of space re-entry vehicles. The Grid version of TENT, which is planned for next summer, will allow to run an operational grid over all the DLR sites as well as to build an operational grid for industrial use. Andreas Schreiber also expects that the "Globusizing" of TENT will allow for a transparent access to heterogeneous resources to facilitate simulation work flows. Please find more details on this project at the TENT Web site.
Leslie Versweyveld |
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