This article can be found at www.e-science.soton.ac.uk/posters
Geodise: Grid-enabled Optimisation and
Design Search for Engineering
Geodise is an EPSRC funded
research project involving
multi disciplinary teams
working to build a Gridenabled Problem Solving
Environment (PSE).This PSE is
intended to carry out
engineering design search and
optimisation involving
Computational Fluid Dynamics
(CFD), and is bringing
together the collective skills of
engineers and computer
scientists. It is a collaboration
between the Universities of
Southampton, Oxford, and
Manchester.
Grid Middleware- Compute
The Geodise project exposes
a suite of Grid-enabled tools
for design search and
optimisation to the Matlab
environment. Matlab is a PSE
which includes a high level
scripting language.The
Geodise compute toolkit for
Matlab provides programmatic
access to Globus compute
resources through Matlab
functions.We also provide
tools to allow job submission
to a .NET Web service
enabled version of Condor.
These toolkits have been used
to submit optimisation jobs to
test and develop the UK
e-Science Grid.
Grid Middleware- Database
The Geodise database toolkit
aims to deliver sophisticated
but easy to use tools to help
engineers find, compare, reuse,
and share the data created by
their applications.We allow
additional metadata describing
the nature of the files to be
defined by engineers and
transparently converted using
an XML toolkit developed in
collaboration with the DTI
funded GEM project (Molinari,
Southampton), then archived.
Data of interest is located by
querying this metadata.We
adopt open standards and a
service oriented approach to
provide components that can
be utilised by higher level
applications for managing data
on the Grid.
CFD Tools and
Optimisation MethodsResults
We have demonstrated the
use of our toolkits to tackle
the optimisation of a 3D
nacelle geometry.There are
three essential elements
involved in CFD-based shape
optimisation problems:
geometry design using
Computer Aided Design
(CAD) tools, mesh generation,
and solution. A parametric
geometry is generated using
the Pro/Engineer package.The
mesh generation package
Gambit is used to generate
the mesh for the Fluent CFD
analysis package. For the
optimisation, we have
combined a design of
experiments, response surface
model, and a two-stage hybrid
genetic algorithm with a
gradient descent method from
our optimisation toolkit.
We are also developing a new
generation of adjoint-based
CFD solvers, which are able
to return CFD solutions for
2D and 3D problems, but also
give gradient information
about the sensitivity of the
solution to changes in the
input geometry.
Ontology and Knowledge
Management
Ontology engineering in
Geodise aims to facilitate
resource sharing and reuse
through semantics-based
service description and
discovery.The knowledge
management is concerned
with the provision of
knowledge support for
intelligent and guided decisionmaking in the Geodise PSE. A
typical application of such
technologies has been to
demonstrate ontology-assisted
and knowledge-based advice in
which a rule-based workflow
advisor guides the designer in
the selection and
configuration of optimisation
methods by reasoning over
design state space. A task
ontology is used to assist the
discovery and selection of
appropriate resources.
Workflow Tool
The Geodise workflow tool
enables workflow
construction, execution and
monitoring of the Gridenabled design process using
our Matlab toolkits.The
graphical workflow
construction tool allows
components to be linked and
dataflows between
components to be configured.
The execution process
automation is controlled by
script generation, run-time job
management, and job state
notification and monitoring.
Team Members
A.S. Campobasso, L. Chen,
S.J. Cox, M.C. Duta, M.H. Eres,
M.B. Giles, C.A. Goble, Z. Jiao,
A.J. Keane, G.E. Pound,
C. Puleston, N.R. Shadbolt,
W. Song, F.Tao, J.L.Wason,
F. Xu
Southampton Regional e-Science Centre, School of Engineering Sciences,
University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ
Tel: +44 (0)2380 593116; Fax: +44 (0)2380 597082;
Email: projectoffice@geodise.org;
www.geodise.org