A framework for component-based distributed simulation on the grid : execution support
Yong Wang · 2008
Nowadays, computer simulation, the modeling of a physical system on a computer, plays an important role in various areas such as industrial production, business, education, engineering and science.As the complexity of the simulation system keeps increasing, more and more computing resources are required to carry out the simulation.The Grid is defined as coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations.It provides services for distributed computing, such as sharing computing power and data storage capacity over the Internet.It is therefore considered to be an ideal environment to run large-scale simulation systems.However, there is still no mature framework for developing and conducting simulations on the Grid.Thus a Framework for Component-based Distributed Simulation on the Grid (SOAr-DSGrid) is proposed.It is a service-oriented, component-based and distributed framework that supports the execution of large-scale simulations.A Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is essentially a collection of independent services with well-defined interfaces that can be accessed without knowledge of their implementation.The architecture is widely used to achieve resource virtualization, on-demand provisioning, and service (resource) sharing.With SOA, it is much easier for clients to invoke the services provided by the system.A component-based approach separates the whole system into different parts based on their functionalities.The approach provides better reusability as components with well defined interfaces can be used again in other systems easily.Developers can follow the component-based approach to develop high quality systems.Fully distributed simulation execution is the most important characteristic of the framework, and is the key for the framework to support large-scale simulations.It means that all simulation components can directly communicate with each other without ini