The Geodise project: making the Grid usable through Matlab

The Geodise project is one of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council pilot projects. It has produced a set of toolboxes to aid the engineer in the design process by making available a suite of intelligent design optimization and search tools, CAD packages and mesh generation tools. It has been used to enable CFD analysis packages to be integrated with distributed Grid-enabled computing, analysis, data and knowledge resources.The users of the Geodise toolkits act as clients to remote compute and database resources that are exposed as Grid services. Users are authenticated, and then authorized to access resources to which they have rights. Using the Compute Toolbox they can submit their own code to compute resources, or run software packages that are available as services. Users can also test available resources, decide where to run a job and monitor job status. Additionally, the requirements of design search and optimization mean that compute resources must be available programmatically to algorithms that may initiate a large number of computationally intensive jobs serially or in parallel.The functionality of the Geodise toolkits is exposed to different scripting environments such as Matlab and Jython. The Matlab package provides an interpretive language for numerical computation, built-in mathematical and graphical functions and numerous specialized toolkits for advanced mathematics, signal processing and control design. Jython is a pure Java platform independent implementation of the high-level, dynamic, object-oriented language Python. Both Matlab and Python/Jython are widely used in academia and industry to prototype algorithms, and to visualize and analyze data. By adopting these environments as the user interfaces for the Geodise toolkits, we pragmatically ensure that they can easily be integrated into an environment routinely used by our industrial and academic partners. In addition to command line tools, the Geodise project has also produced a graphical user interface, called the Geodise Workflow Tool, which allows users to construct and execute workflows, and execute them locally or on distributed Grid resources. Figure 1 gives a more detailed view of the Geodise system architecture. This architecture ensures that engineers can perform complicated simulations related to design search and optimization easily on different Grid resources