Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The engineers at the shipyard develop a new ship using the Ship Design and
Simulation System SESIS. This ship design contains sandwich components for the
funnel which are designed by consultants from supplier companies.
The use case shows the required simulation of a 60 minute real time fire which
was specified by the future ship owner because the funnel has to meet an A-60 fire
rating, which means the temperature must never exceed 180° C on the unexposed
side of the wall during a 60 minute fire exposure. Such a simulation needs approxi-
mately one month of computing time on a single PC. This can be reduced to around
one day on a 32-node cluster system available at a Service Provider. This Grid
scenario can become typical for future ship design.
The shipyard is using the fire simulation currently at the shipyard during the
design phase. The jobs are currently distributed on the computing resources that are
available at the shipyard. However the users at the shipyard noticed that the trend
is going towards using more computational power and they predict that it is only a
matter of time until they will hire external utility computing providers. In particular
for CFD and explicit FEM Codes hiring external resources seems to be unavoidable.
However the Business Experiment clearly illustrated that the following opera-
tional and performance requirements need to be fulfilled from the shipyard point
of view before Grid-enabled simulation can be a standard part of their production
workflow.
10.5.1 Operational Requirements
Before a contract with a service provider can be signed there needs to be a pay
scale model for the outsourced services, i.e. how much does it cost to use a CPU
of a certain type for one hour. If commercial software is used it is also necessary
to define how much it will cost to use this software for an hour. Another important
aspect is the quality of service, i.e. how reliable are the resources, once the job is
submitted to the service provider, how long will it take (on average) to finish.
Software licenses must be available, either at the target systems of the service
provider or they must be remotely accessible from there via a license server. Since
this has been an unsolved problem in Grid environments, a new solution has been
developed in the BEinGRID project (for a more detailed description of the solution
see section 8.4 in chapter 8).
Since the data that is exchanged and the calculations that are performed exter-
nally are highly confidential, security is a major issue. The shipyard requires that the
system should interact only with authenticated and authorized users. When sharing
data only the consultant or supplier that needs to work with this data may get access
to the ship data. This requirement is solved by the SESIS system.
The system should provide generic interfaces, i.e. it should be possible to access
resources from different service providers, so that the shipyard can choose the
provider that makes the best offer. This implies that the system should support open
standards to guarantee interoperability with other service providers using different
middlewares and access mechanisms.
