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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
DAMIEN COORDINATOR DISCUSSES
APPLYING GRID TO INDUSTRY
Specialized design problems can require massive computing efforts.
Middleware
tools to harness the power of Grid computing have been proven to work in real
industrial applications, through the work of IST project DAMIEN.
Helping To Design Aircraft
EADS, a major aerospace company and DAMIEN consortium member, used the
system
in real applications across its sites in Europe. "Before you can get official
certification for a new design of aircraft, extensive tests have to be carried
out," said Michael Resch, professor at HLRS (High Performance Computing
Center) at Universitaet Stuttgart, and DAMIEN coordinator.
By way of analogy, he said if an aircraft's wing fluttered like a flag in
the
wind, it could lead to structural failure. "The design of the wing can be
optimized through simulation, but requires massive computing effort. You use
computational fluid dynamics to model the air flow around the wing, and you
analyze the structural mechanics of the wing to see where it is stressed. The
shape of the wing changes as a result of these stresses and, as if this wasn't
already complicated enough, you then have to revise the computed airflow to
take account of this change in shape, and so it goes on."
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"Different EADS sites carry out particular parts of the development
process,"
continued Resch. "So one site might have expertise and resources for
computational fluid dynamics, and another for structural mechanics. The DAMIEN
tests involved the EADS sites at Paris and Toulouse. Each site would work on
their part of the simulation for a few minutes and then exchange data with the
other site using the multi-gigabit research network, GEANT. You can think of
the DAMIEN toolset as giving development engineers access to a virtual
supercomputer."
The simulation of acoustical properties is another area that requires
massive
computing effort, and where DAMIEN finds application. EADS, for example, has
employed it in a multi-physics application for vibro-acoustic simulation that
has been used, in conjunction with DAMIEN, to simulate noise-reduction
measures within aircraft cabins, etc.
Success At ISC 2003
The DAMIEN toolset was demonstrated at the International Supercomputing
Conference (ISC) 2003. The demonstration was a computation- and
communication-intensive application in the area of bio-informatics called
RNAfold. The computational Grid for this demonstration consisted of 22
high-performance computers at different sites around the world.
HLRS participated in the HPC (High Performance Computing) Challenge, and
was
awarded first place in the category "Most Geographically Distributed
Applications." The application used was fastDNAml, which is a parallel program
for studying evolutionary relationships, and which used PACX-MPI (a DAMIEN
development).
What Makes DAMIEN Different?
"Most Grid projects tend to be aimed at new applications, such as searching
across databases or Web crawling, etc., in which computer performance is less
relevant than data handling," explained Resch. "DAMIEN had a different
emphasis, and was about using distributed resources for classical simulations
that require large computational effort."
"What we did was to extend the capability of commonly-used simulation tools
from the non-distributed environment to the Grid environment," said Resch. "In
order to do this, we had to develop middleware tools, which can be thought of
as the 'glue' between a computer's operating system and application programs.
We took well-known and accepted tools, such as MPI [Message Passing
Interface], which is often deployed in high performance computing systems, and
adapted them."
"Specifically, the extensions fall within three areas," added Resch.
"First,
we had to integrate an additional communication layer that reflected the
characteristics of distributed environments. Then we had to adapt the tools to
take on board Quality of Service (QoS) handling, which is a network concept
that enables flexible network resource management. Finally, we had to improve
the usability of these distributed tools and the various distributed
environments."
So where does DAMIEN stand now? "Three of the components in the DAMIEN
toolset
were extended and are commercially available," concluded Resch. "DAMIEN is a
very powerful tool, but the market for it is very small. We decided that it
was better to make the fourth tool available under an Open Source agreement,
where it will benefit from, and give benefit to, the research community."
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