A system for management of Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations for civil engineering

Abstract

We introduce a web-based system for management of Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) simulations. This system provides an interface for users, on a web-browser, to have an intuitive, user-friendly means of dispatching and controlling long-running simulations. CFD presents a challenge to its users due to the complexity of its internal mathematics, the high computational demands of its simulations and the complexity of inputs to its simulations and related tasks. We designed this system to be as extensible as possible in order to be suitable for many different civil engineering applications. The front-end of this system is a webserver, which provides the user interface. The back-end is responsible for starting and stopping jobs as requested. There are also numerous components specifically for facilitating CFD computation. We discuss our experience with presenting this system to real users and the future ambitions for this project.