Grid Technology for the aerospace market: a real case

We develop tools for Grid Computing, capable of running in many different platforms (based on the Unix/Linux family or on Windows), easy to install, maintain and use. Our middleware InnerGrid is the core of all of these tools.

My professional background is aerospace applied research. Before coming here, I have faced this situation many times: while you are battering your computer (maybe a workstation) you see that many others are weakly loaded, because nobody is working in them or simply because they are involved in lighter calculations. After my first week here I could already tell you many applications in the field where InnerGrid can play a decisive role. And after a couple of weeks more, I can tell my own experience with it.

Wherever a repetitive computation exploring a parameters space is needed, InnerGrid can get the best from your computational resources. A clear application example is the installation I have made in EADS Toulouse, at the Corporate Research Centre France, last week.

The engineering problem is to compute the electromagnetic field around a given object, like a ship or an aircraft. This is computed by solving numerically the Maxwell equations, where each computation is done for a given frequency. The Physics and Mathematics Department has developed its own code, EMC 2000, which iterates through a frequency range, each interaction done independently. By the end of the afternoon, InnerGrid was running there and we manage to build a module for the "gridisation" of their electromagnetic code, for a group of PC's running under Windows.

This installation will allow this research group to cover a wider range of problems in a much more efficient way. The parameters space covered is spanned by the frequency range, completed with different kind of values distribution (linear of logarithmic). Also, different geometries and source configuration can be explored. They plan to integrate all of the PCs available to them, including an 8-processor NEC workstation and some laptops.

The flexibility of InnerGrid allows all of them to get in and out of the Grid, even during an execution with no data loss. A very attractive point for them is that module execution and control is performed through the InnerGrid Desktop, allowing remote runs that can be presented as real time demos.