The development of a grid based engineering design problem solving environment

This paper gives an overview of the grid based Engineering Design Problem Solving Environment (PSE) being developed at Southampton University. Our current PSE is based on our Options optimiser and the Cardiff VCCE and XML component model. Essentially, VCCE provides a GUI to enable a user to setup and execute a computation by creating a task graph from available components via drag and drop operations on a sketchpad display. In order to provide an environment that more naturally meets the data-centric view of users, two major enhancements to the PSE are planned. The first concerns scheduling and task farming. The ultimate goal is to achieve within the PSE, an asynchronous computational workflow pattern where analysis tasks can seek to exploit whatever computational resources are available in various workstation clusters. The second enhancement concerns computational resource control and job control and the setting up of an Engineering Design Grid Portal.