Grid-Based System for Product Design Optimization

This paper describes the progress of developing a Grid-based system for product design optimizations to increase the engineer¿s productivity by saving him tedious, manual, and error-prone work of organizing, maintaining, submitting and monitoring computational workflows comprising hundreds of jobs in a heterogeneous distributed environment. The approach is that once the optimization process is interactively defined through a GUI, the process runs asynchronously, automatically, and autonomously. This goal is being achieved through horizontal integration by employing a Service Oriented Architecture. The developed cyberinfrastructure comprises a collection of Grid services that automates creation, submission and monitoring of jobs. In addition, support is provided for accessing information needed to identify the reasons of failures, should any occur, The front end of the system augments a commercial, state-of-the-art user graphical interface (Abacus CAE) for defining a finite element analysis problem with custom GUI components for specifying the optimization problem and providing access to remote resources. The access to remote resources is achieved by embedding clients of Grid services in the Abacus CAE.