Special Features:
GRID TECHNOLOGY FOR THE AEROSPACE
MARKET: A REAL CASE
By Mariano Vázquez, GridSystems
As a GridSystems' consultant in the Aerospace Area, I would like to take
this opportunity to expand on my experience with a real case. In doing so, I
hope this will help others in their research.
To share computational resources in a highly efficient way is an old goal
that every body working in a computerized environment can understand. The
point is how to achieve it.
With the advent of Internet and the progressive improvement of intranets,
concrete ideas have risen in this direction. What most people don't know is
that some of these ideas are becoming real stuff right now.
This is what we do at GridSystems.
We develop tools for Grid Computing, capable of running on many different
platforms (based on Unix/Linux or Windows, etc.), easy to install, maintain
and use.
Our middleware InnerGrid is the core of all of these tools.
My background is in aerospace applied research. Before coming to
GridSystems, I was faced with the same suituation reapeatedly; while some were
battering their computers, others computers were not able to handle the work-
load.
It took about a week before I realized that there were many places where
the InnerGrid could play a decisive role. And it took another week for me to
be able to share that experience with you.
Wherever a repetitive computation task exploring parameters was required,
the InnerGrid offered the best computational resources. A clear application
example was the installation I engineered in EADS Toulouse, at the Corporate
Research Centre in France.
The engineering problem was to compute the electromagnetic field around a
given object, like a ship or an aircraft.
This was computed by solving numerically the Maxwell equations, where each
computation was done for a given frequency. The Physics and Mathematics
Department had developed their own code, EMC 2000, which iterated through a
frequency range. Each interaction done independently.
By the end of the afternoon, InnerGrid was running there and we managed to
build a module for the "gridisation" of their electromagnetic code with a
group of PC's running under Windows.
This installation allowed the research group to cover a wide range of
problems in a much more efficient way. The parameter space covered was spanned
by the frequency range and completed with different kind of value
distributions either linear or algorithmic.
Also, different geometries and source configurations could be explored.
EADS Toulouse planned to integrate all of the PC's available to them,
including an 8 processor NEC workstation and some laptops.
The flexibility of InnerGrid allowed all of them to access the Grid during
an execution with no data loss.
Another interesting aspect for them was that in the module itself,
execution and control was performed through the InnerGrid desktop, allowing
remote runs that could be presented as real-time demos.
Courtesy of: Mariano Vázquez, GridSystems.
http://www.gridsystems.com
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