Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Skjellum, Anthony

Committee Member

Reese, Donna S.

Committee Member

Shivaji, Ratnasingham

Committee Member

Haupt, Tomasz

Committee Member

Briley, W. Roger

Date of Degree

5-10-2003

Document Type

Dissertation - Open Access

Major

Computational Engineering (Program)

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

College

James Worth Bagley College of Engineering

Department

Computational Engineering Program

Abstract

Multidisciplinary computational simulations involve interactions between distributed applications, datasets, products, resources, and users. Because the very nature of the simulation software emphasizes a single-computer, small-usership and audience, the kinds of applications that have been developed often are unfriendly to incorporation into a distributed model. However, advances in networking infrastructure, and the natural tendency for information to be geographically distributed place strong requirements on integration of single-computer codes with distributed information sources, as well as multiple computer codes that are geographically distributed in their execution. The hypothesis of this dissertation is that it is possible, via novel integration of Internet, Distributed Computing, and Grid technologies, to create a distributed computational simulation systems that satisfies the requirements of modern multidisciplinary computational simulation systems without compromising functionality, performance, or security of existing applications. Furthermore, such a system would integrate disparate applications, resources, and users and would improve the productivity of users by providing new functionality not currently available. The hypothesis is proved constructively by first prototyping the Enterprise Computational Services framework based on a multi-tier architecture using the Java 2 Enterprise Edition platform and Web Services and then two distributed systems, the Distributed Marine Environment Forecast System and Distributed Simulation System for Seismic Performance of Urban Regions, are prototyped using this enabling framework. Several interfaces to the framework are prototyped to illustrate that the same framework can be used to develop multiple front-end clients required to support different types of users within a given computational domain. The two domain specific distributed environments prototyped using the framework illustrate that the framework provides a reusable common infrastructure irrespective of the computational domain. The effectiveness and utility of the distributed system and the framework are demonstrated by using a representative collection of computational simulations. Additional benefits provided by the distributed systems in terms of new functionality provided are evaluated to determine the impact on user productivity. The key contribution of this dissertation is a reusable infrastructure that could evolve to meet the requirements of next-generation hardware and software architectures while supporting interaction between a diverse set of users and distributed computational resources and multidisciplinary applications.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/20760

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