Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
10.2 The Architecture of the Grid-enabled SESIS
Before the system could be deployed at the shipyard the following steps were neces-
sary: First, it was necessary to select the middleware to which the system connects
and to install it on the service provider site; i.e. the core of the middleware and some
basic services were installed. After that, specific services for the successful execu-
tion of the experiment were developed. These services included load balancing for
parallel execution and a graphical user interface for easy handling. The simulator is
able to compute the fire security and heat transfer of the new sandwich technology.
The implementations of these services conform to the de-facto web service standard
(WSRF), guaranteeing a high degree of interoperability. The service that was
installed was an open source code for fire simulation called FDS (Fire Dynamics
Simulator, http://www.fire.nist.gov), which is a computation fluid dynamics (CFD)
model of fire driven fluid flow.
The Business Experiment was based on SESIS, which resulted from a national
research project dedicated to developing a design and simulation system for the
early stages of ship development. The goal of SESIS is to facilitate the develop-
ment of new ships at the shipyards. This is achieved by performing collaborative
simulations between the shipyards and the suppliers in a virtual organization (VO).
Within the VO, the partners co-operate in a heterogeneous environment. SESIS is
built upon state-of-the-art software technologies, such as Grid Services, extendable
GUI-Frameworks, and wrappers for the integration of legacy code and simulation
applications (see fig. 10.3).
SESIS is a system with clearly defined interfaces that allow the addition of
new functionalities via software plug-ins. Thus it is possible to combine existing
software components with other commercial solutions. The software enabling the
development of the SESIS system is the Reconfigurable Computing Environment
(RCE), which has been developed by DLR and Fraunhofer SCAI.
The concept of the SESIS system architecture is that every computer in the
system contains an installation of the basic software. Depending on the purpose of
the system (client, server) or individual requirements of the engineer using it, this
installation might have another configuration via one or more additional plug-ins.
SESIS has a component architecture based on “OSGi™ - The Dynamic Module
System for Java™”. All SESIS installations have a predefined set of plug-ins guar-
anteeing secure distributed data access and communication.
The Grid integration into SESIS is done by additional plug-ins, which handle
all the communication between the SESIS system and the Grid middleware (see
fig. 10.3). This concept is not bound to a particular Grid middleware. In the Business
Experiment presented here SESIS was extended to be able to use Grid resources
from SESIS application methods to start external applications on remote hosts. The
methods in this case are Grid clients.
