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The main goal of BE06 is the realisation of a large scale multidisciplinary compute Grid, enabling end-user cooperation to generate cost-effective and optimized solutions for water management, addressing both business and societal aspects in the sector of environmental engineering.

Fact Sheet

What is the experiment about?

BE06 will bring groundwater modelling combined with simulation-based optimization onto Grid infrastructure. In order to realize large optimization tasks groundwater modelling will be distributed on multiple resources to run large numbers of simulation processes in parallel. Parameters of these simulations are controlled by the optimization system. Based on the simulation results relevant parameters will be adapted according to the requirements of the simulation-based optimization in an iterative process until satisfying, i. e. optimal results are obtained. The results influence decisions in the environmental sector, e. g. designing groundwater drawdown or remediation systems for polluted groundwater aquifers. These possibilities will be made available to end customers with or without major know how in Grid technology as well as service providers through Grid service provision.

: FEFLOW modell explorer UI showing a discretisation of the "Binsheimer Feld" area

Why this experiment?

The goal of this experiment is the realisation of a large scale multidisciplinary compute Grid, enabling the end user project partner to generate cost-effective and optimized solutions even for complex problems of groundwater management and protection, addressing both business and society aspects in the sector of environmental engineering. From the business point of view it will be possible to perform more complex computing tasks, directly influencing the decision-making process by providing better forecast and simulation possibilities for the environmental state, improving decisions affecting the environment. The Grid-based infrastructure to be developed will provide a cutting-edge technology with its benefits in business and society and will have sustainable great value. Not only will the basic services for simulation and optimization be provided by the Grid infrastructure. Grid based backup-mechanisms and data stores which have to be accessed are mandatory for a reasonable utilization and therefore will have to be developed and integrated as well. The research activities will have to face the subjects of persistence and reliability, as well as global access to the Grid infrastructure and the development of new business models for collaboration in a multidisciplinary international Grid-economy. By reducing total cost of ownership, administrative overhead and computation time for the end user project partner, the experiment and its results will have an impact on both the economic and ecologic/technical sector of groundwater management. The final objective in providing this infrastructure is to establish a sustainable relationship between end users and service providers, thus leading to a better position in developing sustainable solutions in groundwater management and protection, taking into the account environmental and socio-economic considerations.

Industrial input/added-value of this experiment

New Grid-based services in planning and decision making
- Grid-based groundwater modelling coupled with optimization as a sales product
- Optimal use of resource
- Return of investment
Reduction of total cost of ownership
Reduction of administrative overhead
Provide possibility to solve complex, large scale planning and decision making tasks …
… thus optimizing investment and improving aquatic ecology

How is this experiment going to be handled?

Infrastructure

The core software component is the groundwater simulation software FEFLOW which can run on a variety of platforms like Windows, different commercial Unix systems and Linux. Currently, it performs its calculations sequentially and usually does not require specialized and costly computing systems. Thus, a Grid environment which consists of inexpensive Linux PC clusters with standard Internet connectivity seems to be the most appropriate choice.

: FEFLOW in usage ...

The main computing resources for the experiment will be the 256 CPU cluster “Rubens” at the University of Siegen, which currently consists of 128 nodes with 2 AMD Opteron 2GHz 64Bit CPUs and 2 GB of main memory each, running SuSE SLES 9.3. Additionally, computing resources provided by HLRS Stuttgart and a smaller cluster located at WASY, Berlin will be incorporated into the Grid infrastructure.

Grid Middleware

A middleware should be chosen that builds upon Grid standards like WSRF and OGSA, but it is also important that it has already reached a sufficient quality of implementation. Thus it was planed to evaluate two possible choices – Unicore/GS and Globus Toolkit 4 (GT4). As Unicore/GS was not operational during the evaluation phase GT4 has been chosen.

Other Software

The core application of this project is the groundwater simulation system FEFLOW developed by WASY which will be modified and extended to integrate the calculation core into the Grid environment and to allow the end user easy access, ideally from within the familiar FEFLOW user interface. Furthermore, the optimization software suite OpTiX will be used for providing the optimization algorithms.