PartnerGrid - Cooperative Grid Solutions for Industrial Applications

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Project description

Design and production processes are more and more designed in a work-sharing way. Instead of covering the most part of the value added chain by themselves companies focus on its core competences und buy hardware, equipment and services from third parties. By selecting between multiple partners costs can be reduced and the most capable partner can be chosen for working on a specified task.
With Grid technology and appropriate soft- and hardware infrastructures, as they are developed within the D-Grid-project, the required cooperation processes can be supported in an effective and efficient way. The PartnerGrid project deals with the development of a cooperation platform used for collaboration of companies on the basis of the D-Grid. The functionality of the cooperation platform and its benefit for the participating companies are proved and demonstrated with the help of typical scenarios from different domains. The PartnerGrid project sets a high value on the usage of Grid technology by small and half-inferior companies, which do not want to build up and maintain complex IT infrastructures by themselves.

In the PartnerGrid project two scenarios will be realized. One shows the collaboration of customer and foundry for the design of pour devices. The foundry industry is under considerable strain caused by the increasing requirements in terms of quality and the need for very short develop periods. The challenges within the foundry sector can be handled successfully if expertise, high-quality software products and capable services interact in an efficient way. Foundry simulations are the base for optimizing processes within the pour devices development. Therefor the requirement exists to incorporate all available resources (powerful computer, support) and to provide them to the involved parties with the help of Grid technology.

Simulation of foundry processes

Simulation of shaping processes

Another scenario shows the collaboration in the metal-working industry for planing shaping processes. The use of virtual techniques, e.g. crash and shaping simulations, within the product development became an essential tool in the metal-working industry. Fast and secure electronic data exchange and the management of CAD, compute and experiment data became a standard in manufacture companies as well. In contrast the collaboration between the appropriate services, project support, results presentation and expertise exchange (collaborative engineering) mostly happens in a conventional way on-site of the customer. This results, from the point of view of GNS/GNS Systems, in an interesting usage scenario: Services like project support, compute services and specialist counseling, for customers coming from half-inferior companies are realized with the help of Grid technology.

In the PartnerGrid project a software platform (PartnerGrid infrastructure) is developed based upon Grid technology. It efficiently supports the cooperative collaboration within a virtual organization. The software platform closes the gap between "generic" services, provided on Grid level, and requirements of companies for a flexible, handy software platform with extensive, "application oriented" functionality. The software platform is based upon existing predevelopments of the involved project partners (Fraunhofer institutes SCAI, IAO, ITWM and DLR) and the D-Grid infrastructure and services. The mentioned scenarios serve as demonstrations for an economic interesting usage of the Grid technology and describes multiplier for the acceptance and distribution of the technology.

DLR Simulation and Software Technology tasks

DLR Simulation and Software Technology brings as a predevelopment the RCE (Remote Component Environment) (developed within the SESIS project) in the PartnerGrid project. RCE is an integration platform for new and already existing applications. Thereby it covers the recurrent need for identical software components by providing them as base services within the platform. Such components are data management, workflow engine, graphical user interface, distributed environment or Grid computing interface.

RCE is the central software layer of the PartnerGrid infrastructure. The use of RCE base services is focused on the data management, the workflow component and the Grid environment.
The task of DLR Simulation and Software Technology is to embed RCE in the PartnerGrid layer architecture. That means on the one hand to connect the Web portal and on the other hand to enable the access of Grid services.
For the portal connection a Web service interface will be defined and RCE will be extended with an appropriate Web service. It provides access to the needed functionality of RCE. For the realization of the access to D-Grid services the Grid Application Toolkit (GAT) will be integrated. Furthermore DLR Simulation and Software Technology supports the partners of the industry by integrating their existing applications into RCE, by linking them up to workflows and by submitting application specific compute jobs from RCE into the D-Grid.

Project partner

Information
PartnerGrid-Homepage

Project runtime
01.06.2007 - 31.05.2010