Computational Grid Portals in Virtual Engineering Design Environment

Computational grid portals are becoming essential tools in automotive companies world-wide for managing compute resources for virtual engineering and design. Many automotive and associated manufacturing industries are taking initiatives for making the computing resources transparent from the integrated design environment. This paper illustrates how the grid portal technologies can fulfil these enterprise development needs. We demonstrate the power of Grid portal and Grid middleware technology by developing a computational Grid portal and integrating it with Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) applications in the virtual engineering environment. Using the developed web-based portal, engineers can use the Grid recourses anytime from anywhere. A framework/toolkit is also developed which is kept in front of the enterprise firewall to make any kind of access to the computational Grid resources completely secure from the user. By integrating this portal toolkit with the CAE applications, engineers are able to use the Grid resources completely transparently which lets them concentrate more on their respective jobs from remote location.