WORKFLOW-BASED DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENT FOR LEGACY SIMULATION APPLICATIONS

Computer simulations play an increasingly important role to explain or predict phenomena of the real world. We recognized during our work with scientific institutes that many simulation programs can be considered legacy applications with low software ergonomics, usability, and hardware support. Often there is no GUI and tedious manual tasks have to be conducted. We are convinced that the information technology and software engineering concepts can help to improve this situation to a great extent. In this poster presentation we therefore propose a concept of a simulation environment for legacy scientific applications. Core of the concept are simulation workflows that enable a distributed execution of former monolithic programs and a resource manager that steers server work load and handles data. As proof of concept we implemented a Monte-Carlo simulation of precipitations in copper-alloyed iron and tested it with real data.