Collaborative steering and post-processing of simulations on HPC resources: everyone, anytime, anywhere

  • Authors:
  • Florian Niebling;Andreas Kopecki;Martin Becker

  • Affiliations:
  • High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS);High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS);Stellba Hydro GmbH & Co. KG

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Web 3D Technology
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Nowadays, most if not all work concerning the technical development of products is aided by computer technology. CAD tools are used to construct the objects, high-quality rendering is used to visualise prototype designs, and most importantly, products are optimised using computational simulation methods. Ensuring the proper and optimal functioning of a future product requires the collaboration of human experts using a multitude of different tools. Computational meshes suitable for numerical simulations have to be created from geometry by meshing experts, boundary conditions -- i.e. parameters that define the different conditions a simulation should try to reproduce -- have to be defined, the simulation has to be started and monitored, and the results have to be analysed. All those steps usually use different tools and need special expertise and knowledge to use. This paper will show how to merge those steps usually performed by different tools into one coherent platform, and how to present the uniform access to this platform in a browser interface. This gives teams of engineers collaborative access to all parameters needed to influence the geometry creation, meshing, simulation on high- performance computing resources and post-processing of their simulation results, delivering these results directly into the web browser using modern WebGL and AJAX techniques. The web-based access introduced in this work also contributes to lowering the threshold for engineers to use remote simulation and post-processing facilities, allowing them to create and analyse data sets on their local workstation or mobile devices. In this paper, we will present a real-life scientific engineering work-flow from the field of turbo-machinery design to demonstrate the applicability of our solution for web-based collaborative interactive simulation and post-processing including a web-based 3D rendering environment.