Case Studies of Four Industrial Meta-Applications

From improved crash simulation to acoustic optimisation to innovative company-saving designs, distributed computing and meta-applications are enabling European industry to compete more effectively in many areas. Three such meta-applications are PROMENVIR, Optimus and TOOLSHED, all developed in recent ESPRIT projects. The PROMENVIR product provides users with all the functionality needed to perform Monte-Carlo analyses of complex problems, from satellite deployment to crash simulation. Optimus, from LMS also enables the user to perform sensitivity analyses, but with a broader focus encompassing classical design of experiment techniques. TOOLSHED is a problem solving environment (PSE) in the truest sense of the word. The package will automate any analysis process, providing the user with CAD importation, mesh generation, computational steering and visualisation in addition to the standard PSE requirements of seamless data transfer and transparent execution of tasks. The parallel implementation of LUSAS, an FE solver from FEA Ltd. developed in the ESPRIT project PARACOMP has been designed to run on a dual use cluster of NT machines, and has many requirements in common with the other meta-applications to be discussed. All of these products have interfaces to Intrepid, the Intelligent Resource Manager from PAC. Intrepid provides each of these packages with full meta-computing management, from a single point of control for the definition of a meta-computer to a clean, intuitive API through which they can control the execution of jobs. It makes use of performance models of applications to determine the CPU load, disk and memory requirements. These parameters are used to ensure both that tasks have the resources they need to execute and that execution of the entire problem is carried out in the most efficient manner. This paper will present an overview of the design of Intrepid, its interaction with these three packages and industrial examples of its application.