Collaborations
Eco-System Modelling
Schooner has recently become part of an
eco-system modelling
project at the University of Arizona with the
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department and the School of Renewable Natural Resources.
The project is combining discrete event modeling, visualization tools, and
geographic information systems to simulate ecosystems at high levels
of resolution and encompassing large areas.
Schooner will be used as the interconnection technology that
enables different pieces of the meta-computation to be executed on
heterogeneous machines spanning the Internet.
Numerical Propulsion System Simulator
The Numerical Propulsion System Simulator
(NPSS)
is a multi-year effort sponsored by NASA
Lewis Research Center
to improve the state-of-the-art in jet engine simulation.
Two goals of this project are to
experiment with steering engine simulations and to
combine low- and high-fidelity engine component simulations.
Schooner has been used in the construction of two meta-computations in
support of NPSS.
One is a prototype simulation executive that employs the
Turbofan Engine System Simulation (TESS), a one-dimensional engine model.
In this executive, the AVS scientific visualization system is used
as a front-end, with Schooner providing the interconnection between
AVS and remote portions of the computation.
TESS represents each of the principal components of an engine as a
module within AVS, and the AVS Network Editor is used to interconnect
modules to represent the airflow through the engine.
A network of this type for the F100 engine
is illustrated below.
Note that a module in TESS can be used to represent more than
one component in the simulated engine, with the characteristics of each
instance determined by the dataflow connections to other engine components
and by values the user supplies through the widget mechanism supported
by AVS.
The widgets for the low-speed shaft module are shown below.
The top widgets are parameter values, while those on the bottom
allow the user to select the remote host to be used for that module
and to specify the executable on that host.
Since TESS modules have no side effects, users can also take advantage
of Schooner's feature for moving components dynamically during execution.
In particular, once the simulation has started, they can select a different
host and Schooner will move the remote computation from the old host to
the new host.
Schooner is also being used in the NPSS project to construct a
prototype zooming application in which the one-dimensional TESS
model is combined with a three-dimensional fan code.
In this application, a monitoring and control system assists
the user in controlling long-running simulations and gives assistance
through an expert system that provides warnings and errors to the user.
Eventually, the expert system will help in steering the execution of the
simulation as well. The zooming project includes researchers in the
Department of Mechanical Engineering at the
University of Toledo
and in the Industrial Engineering Department at Cleveland State University.
An early version of the system was entered in the ``Heterogeneity
Challenge'' at Supercomputing '94. The initial design of the system
is described in
Afjeh95.
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