CASPer

Numerical simulation methods have improved and matured along the last forty years, and improved approaches have allowedfor the simulation of more and more complex phenomenons. Alongside the evolution of the methods used, the growth ofcomputing power has led to more and more precise simulations. It is now possible to accurately predict the behavior ofa product in the early stages of its conception, thus shortening production cycles, as well as reducing the need forphysical prototypes.

There are still two major reasons why numerical simulation is not fully adopted :

• Small and medium enterprises face a heavy entry cost to acquire the computational means(hardware, software licenses, and the personnel to manage them), and the return on investmenton such infrastructure is usually very slow.
• On the other hand, bigger companies can not always fully exploit the simulation infrastructure theydeployed. Once the computational means are in place they may not always be flexible enough for the peopleto fully exploit and share the results of the simulations. It is also hard to occasionally run more complexsimulations than those the infrastructure is designed to scale for.

CASPer:

The consortium created around CASPer regroups:

• two research laboratories, IRISA and LRI, whose fields of excellence revolve around distributed computing andmiddleware for distributed computing
• an industrial research center, EADS CCR, which has developed both software related to distributed computingand numerical simulation
• two major industrial groups, EADS and ALCATEL, both willing to develop more interactive and user-friendlytools for their users to exploit numerical simulation results and to share their resources with outside partners.
• SMEs who want to share more easily and more interactively with their clients the results of simulations they run for them.

The software :

The aim of CASPer is to provide an open source ASP-like platform accessible through the internet and allowing users to :

• use remote ressources to launch a numerical simulation
• share the results within a community of users collaborating on the same project

The core of the job submission environment is currently able to submit jobs to a Globus or Unicore Grid, and should soonbe able to submit jobs on an XtremWeb PC grid. The services provided by CASPer are made available through aweb portal based on the Gridsphere portal.We're also planning to reuse as many as possible of the gridportlets as soon as they're released.

For more information:
http://casperlabs.sourceforge.net