Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
without obtaining new licenses. Before this Business Experiment the communica-
tion between shipyard and the suppliers were in person, via phone or fax. With
SESIS it is possible to securely share data and collaborate online.
The collaboration platform was extended by a Grid interface that allows easy
access to the required computational power via a Grid middleware. A focus was on
cases with a high demand for computational power (fire security and heat transfer of
the new sandwich components), which are typically not available at the shipyard or
supplier. The experiment showed that reliable and significant results can be delivered
within acceptable response times and costs. The technical objectives were realized as
an extension to the interactive ship design and simulation environment SESIS. Due
to the modular structure of SESIS, different Grid middlewares can be accessed, e.g.
UNICORE (http://www.unicore.eu) or GTK4 (http://www.globus.org), and it is very
easy to configure the system to provide access to other high performance computing
resources, like Cloud systems. Before this Business Experiment, Grid technology
had not played a role in the sector of ship building and there was no Grid interface
for compute intense applications.
10.1.3 The Expected Benefits of Grid-enabled Collaborative Simulation
Some years ago, the engineers at the shipyard faced the problem that they had a
huge software suite that had been built over three decades and that had grown to a
point such that it was hard to manage and/or to extend. They decided to invest in
new technologies, from a software technology point of view, such that their software
becomes manageable, modular and extendable. At the same time they investigated
options on how to improve on computation time. When a new ship is designed there
are a lot of issues that need to be considered. Often the engineers rely on their many
years of experience, but when new materials and technologies are used this experi-
ence often needs support from simulation results.
The more efficient simulations can be done in the shipyard, the more the
engineers can investigate which technologies are best suited for their new ship,
e.g. which materials for the hull, which engine, which control systems, etc. are
the best fit. It is easy to exchange components in simulation and see if better
results can be obtained if different components are used. So when bidding on a
tender, the shipyard can have higher confidence that their offer has the best cost-
performance ratio.
Unfortunately the shipyards do not tend to have a lot of computational power
available on their sites, since it is expensive to always have the latest technology
and the corresponding skilled personnel to manage those resources. Also, it may not
be profitable for the shipyard to invest in technology, if they only build about two
ships per year. Heavy calculation for simulation is done in the early design phase
of a ship, i.e. for each ship in the first 4-8 weeks. This means that if the shipyard
constructs 2 vessels per year their resources may only be fully utilized for about
16 weeks per annum and have much less demand the rest of the time.
Therefore the engineers at the shipyard are interested in a solution where they
can have access to hardware resources for the time they need it, and during the
