Logo of Laboratoire d'Informatique de GrenobleAuthor: Laurent PIGEON

Affiliation: LIG – Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble

Reference: PhD Thesis from Institut National Poytechnique de Grenoble, France. Defended on September 21, 2007.

Abstract:

“The complexity of numerical simulations has constantly grown by means of software and computation purposes. The former, the software complexity, is arising from specialized codes which aim at simulating complex physical phenomena. The latter, the computation complexity, is of general concern regarding scientific applications because approaching “real” physical behaviour requires more and more storage and power capacities.

The CAPE-OPEN standard, in the process simulation area, provides a solution to the needs of tierce codes integration by hiding software complexity. As a consequence, interface specifications are set and software components such as DCOM or CORBA are used. In this work, we study the problem of computation load distribution over clusters which software components are CAPE-OPEN compliant. An efficient distributed execution needs to share concurrent activities from the application while minimizing exchanged data loads through the network.

In this context, we present a tightly analysis of process simulations computational scheme that leads to the implementation of two computational distributed environments. The former is used to quantify the benefit on business test cases simulations over a cluster. Nevertheless, industrial technologies limit the optimization implementations necessary to reach the optimal. Then, the latter prototype has been implemented on top of KAAPI runtime. To come to our expectations, KAAPI is extended in order to manage “static” scheduling and various scheduling policies are studied. The KAAPI environment coupled with the extension that we develop is the first step to several experiments in the more general scope of numerical applications.”

Permanent address: HAL-Inria

Comments: Laurent’s work on parallel software architectures using CAPE-OPEN was presented at the 3rd CAPE-OPEN European Conference, also known as the CAPE-OPEN 2006 Annual Meeting. Live demos were presented. Laurent’s work is not only making use of core CAPE-OPEN interfaces like the ones for thermodynamic and physical properties, it is also prototyping the interfaces dedicated to dynamic unit operations in a context of an Operator Training Simulator. The overall goal is to achieve high CPU performance while providing a detailed rendering of an offshore oil production facility.