You are here : 
Calls & Context
DAMIEN
Distributed Applications and Middleware for Industrial Use of European Networks
Abstract
DAMIEN is a project that started out in early 2001 to continue the successful work of the European pilot project for GRID-Computing METODIS. METODIS had successfully shown the feasibility of the GRID-approach in industry. The objective of DAMIEN is to develop further building blocks for a middleware environment for distributed industrial simulation and visualisation in the GRID. Besides the multi-protocol MPI-library PACX-MPI for heterogeneous networks this includes the handling of Quality of Service requirements in distributed simulations. The coupling code interface MpCCI will allow to link distributed applications. Tools for performance analysis (Vampir) and performance prediction (DIMEMAS) are extended to be made GRID-aware. Applications from industry serve as test cases for the developed software.
Objectives
The purpose of DAMIEN is to respond to the emerging infrastructure of computational resources connected by high speed networks which is generally described as the GRID. DAMIEN aims at developing a middleware toolbox which allows application-developers to port their applications to computational GRIDs as well as to ease the handling of distributed computing environments. The toolbox is developed by extending existing tools. The second goal of the project is then to test these tools by industrial applications on a testbed based on European and national high speed networks.
Overall structure of the DAMIEN project
Technical Approach
Central part of the DAMIEN architecture are standards used by industry (i.e. the message-passing standard MPI), and libraries and tools, which the users of high performance computing facilities are familiar with. Based on these already existing tools (DIMEMAS, MpCCI, PACX-MPI, Vampir), DAMIEN defines the necessary extensions to support GRID-computing environments creating a software development environment for GRID-computing. The extensions can be split basically in three parts:
- Integration of an additional communication layer that has to be introduced to reflect the characteristics of distributed environments.
- Integration of Quality-of-Service handling into the tools for enabling a flexible network resource management.
- Ease the usage of the distributed tools and distributed environments.
Testbed
The toolbox developed in the frame of the DAMIEN will be validated on a testbed based on the European high speed networks between the three research centres of the project (CEPBA, CRIHAN, HLRS). The goal is to prove the usability of the toolbox with industrial applications on nowadays networks.
Application
Aeropostale Matra Airbus (EADS CCR) provides a multi-physics application. The application is a new strongly coupled method for vibro-acoustic simulation, which can be used e.g. to simulate the propagation of noise during the launch-phase of rockets or for noise-reduction simulations inside plane-cabins. Due to a high number of entities in the company and their geographical distribution all over Europe, this projects validates GRID-computing as a solution for industrial users.
Innovation
Two major innovations are achieved within the DAMIEN project: First, the project provides the first development environment for end-users including standards, libraries and tools, which they are used to deal with from their regular working environment. Tools like Vampir, DIMEMAS, MpCCI are highly accepted in the area of parallel computing, and are now also made available in GRID environments.
The second major innovation in the project is the integration of the Quality of Service module into the communication software as well as into the tools. Since the performance of GRID applications is strongly influenced by the network between different machines, the management of the network resources is a key issue for GRID environments and their applications.
- Project name:
- DAMIEN
- Contract no:
- IST-2000-25406
- Project type:
- RTD
- Start date:
- 01/01/2001
- Duration:
- 30 months
- Total budget:
- €1,885,166
- Funding from the EC:
- €1,229,348
- Total effort in person-months:
- 198
- Website:
- http://www.hlrs.de/organization/pds/projects/damien
- Contact person:
- Dr. Michael Resch
- email: resch@hlrs.de
- tel: +49 711 685 5834
- fax: +49 711 678 7626
- Project participants:
- CEPBA-UPC - ES
- CRIHAN - FR
- EADS CCR - FR
- HLRS - D
- Pallas GmbH - D
- USTUTT - D
- Keywords:
- Distributed Tools
- GRID-Computing
- Industrial Applications
- MPI
- Collaboration with other EC funded projects:
- GRIDSTART