A group of NAS Division scientists has successfully developed an automated system for executing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) parameter studies on NASA’s Information Power Grid (IPG). The AeroDB system simplifies the process of executing many CFD calculations, while taking advantage of timesaving in a distributed computing environment.
“We wanted to design a tool to automate the process of running and monitoring our CFD tools, Cart3D, and Overflow, ” explained Stuart Rogers, senior scientist on the AeroDB project. “This idea fused with our goal of bringing these applications onto the IPG and demonstrating their usability.”
In its initial trial, AeroDB scripts were used to execute and monitor cases for a large parameter study on a Liquid Glide-back Booster (LGBB) vehicle. Within 72 hours, more than 1000 Cart3D and 100 Overflow cases had completed. “We continued running jobs for seven days and completed just over 3000, so we felt that was pretty successful,” adds Rogers.
The trial used 13 different computing resources at four different locations: NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley; NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio; the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California; and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois.
The AeroDB system includes a series of Perl scripts that interact with IPG software tools. Globusrun launched the jobs, the Grid Common Services broker determined the appropriate execution sites, and user authentication was enabled with grid certificates.
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