A grid-enabled problem solving environment for parallel computational engineering design

This paper describes the development and application of a piece of engineering software that provides a Problem Solving Environment (PSE) capable of launching, and interfacing with, computational jobs executing on remote resources on a computational Grid. In particular it is demonstrated how a complex, serial, engineering optimisation code may be efficiently parallelised, Grid-enabled and embedded within a PSE. The environment is highly flexible, allowing remote users from different sites to collaborate, and permitting computational tasks to be executed in parallel across multiple Grid resources, each of which may be a parallel architecture. A full working prototype has been built and successfully applied to a computationally demanding engineering optimisation problem. This particular problem stems from elastohydrodynamic lubrication and involves optimising the computational model for a lubricant based on the match between simulation results and experimentally observed data.