Distributed computational fluid dynamics

Computational fluid dynamics simulations of relevance to jet-engine design, for instance, are extremely computationally demanding and the use of large-scale distributed computing will allow the solution of problems that cannot be tackled using current resources. It is often appropriate to leave the large datasets generated by CFD codes local to the compute resource in use at the time. This naturally leads to a distributed database of results that will need to be federated as a coherent resource for the engineering community. We describe the use of Globus and Condor within Cambridge for sharing compute resources, progress on defining XML standards for the annotation of CFD datasets and a distributed database framework for them.