Abstract: Constellation
Constellation is a platform for different aerospace related projects that
need intensive computational power.
The platform supports the efforts of participating projects by providing
Distributed Computing capability using BOINC[1].
Constellation will send work-units of attached projects to volunteering,
idle PCs where the units are processed. The combined power of all
volunteering users will help to solve important scientific tasks in fields
from astronomy to aerospace-engineering beginning from student up to
university projects.
The bottom line is to benefit from the generosity of the volunteers and to
benefit from the accumulation of different projects, like sharing
programming knowledge in distributed computing and influencing the
others' simulation by its own solutions.
The platform is an open space for anyone, who is an air and space
enthusiast and wants to donate idle computing time or even skill for a
sub-project on platform. Applications for sub-project are welcome!
Project Motivation
In particular in aerospace sciences simulation and optimization are major
tasks to minimize structure weight, to maximize thrust or to determine
system reliability.
These numerical tasks need a high level of resources and hardware-
support and Constellation platform offers distributed computing power
to projects from professionals to students to solve their problems in an
adequate time without the need to maintain their own super-computer or
cluster system.
In this way it is possible to get access to the needed computing power by
a wider range of researchers who wouldn't have been able to create those
resources because of financial, administration and operation or because
of bureaucracy reasons.
Constellation's goal is to expedite fundamental and applicable research
and bonding researchers with citizen scientists and public.
Project Implementation
As a DGLR (german aerospace society)[2] academic student team at the
University of Stuttgart, Germany, we set up a distributed super-computer
that offers computing power by idle single desktop computers of
volunteers connected via the internet. This accumulated computing power
is provided to aerospace research purposes, that universities and private
research institutions and projects normally can't afford. With this approach
we demonstrate the capability of synergetic co-operation of scientists and
scientific enthused ordinary persons.
In contrast to classic super-computers, that have high acquisition-,
maintenance- and operation-costs and aren't state of the art after just a few
years, our Constellation computer is a worldwide distributed, continuously
and dynamically evolving system with high heterogeneity in which anyone
can participate who runs a computer with Windows, Linux or Mac OS X
operating system. This high-performance is used to solve aerospace related
tasks, such as trajectory optimization (application: TrackJack).
Constellation is in its early public productivity phase and even in the first
month 500 volunteers with 1500 participating machines generated approx.
1.2 TFLOPS of computing power (1.2*10^12 FLoating point OPerations
per Second). It can be assumed that the amount of participating machines
will increase up to 5000 with about 10 TFLOPS within one year (reference
data from RNA-World, another Rechenkraft.net e.V. project [3]).
The Constellation computer represents a remarkable performance that is by
far superior to high-performance clusters and it increases daily. In this way
hundreds of trajectories can be simulated and optimized depending in the
task's complexity per day. Participating users can follow their contribution
in a clearly arranged webinterface. Finished results will be send back
automatically and can be archived by the sub-projects scientists.
Operation and maintenance of this system requires expenditure of time
during user support, who post a variety of questions on our online-forum,
so that besides the scientific aspect the project has a very interesting
educational component („science & society“).
Figure 1: Constellation website
Supported by:
Applications and Perspectives
There are three applications as sub-projects on the Constellation
platform.
o TrackJack is an ascend trajectory simulation and optimizer for space-
launcher systems and space-crafts. TrackJack's origin is part of a diploma
thesis in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences
Bremen.
TrackJack app is processing test-workunits and will optimize the
maximum altitude of HyEnD hybrid-engine sounding rocket[4]. (Figure 2&3)
o Extreme Machine's idea is not to create a huge, multimillion ton
exploration rover machine, rather an extremely optimized device, under
the realms of very classical mechanics, to perform specific tasks.
Extreme Machine simulates the rover dynamics. (Figure 4)
o On The Moon aims to simulate the process occurring at moon near the
surface. It is a large scale simulation aiming to create a total model of the
moon system, and to compare it with data collected from the Google
Lunar X-PRIZE (GLXP)[5] mission.
Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4
Currently the BOINC infrastructure Constellation uses supports
independent workunits. The above applications respect this limit by using
splitted tasks as workunits that doesn't rely on other workunits' result.
But there are aerospace tasks, like in computational fluid dynamics
(CFD), that are only feasible when the complete tasks is solved in
parallel to finish in a decent time. Therefore Constellation is working to
extend the system to combine the advantages of distributed computing
system with that of parallel clusters to create a virtual cluster where
nodes are connected via the internet.
We work together with Volpex Group at University of Houston to bring
parallel execution to Constellation and to other BOINC-projects, and we
examine MAGE[6] of University of Marburg as an additional candidate.
Figure 5: CFD analysis with FLUENT
We want to use parallel execution for CFD analysis.We want to use
OpenFOAM[7] because it's used in the scientific and academic
community, it offers a wide range of solvers and the main reason is that
its GNU General Public License allows the use in a distributed
environment. In comparison Ansys' powerful CFX and FLUENT[8]
programmes use a proprietary software licence that makes it difficult to
use outside the given licence agreement.
For Constellation a CFD application is intended to be used in
aerodynamics and stability simulation, in engine combustion analysis for
micro- and jet engines, in ramjet, scramjet and pulse detonation engine
and rocket engines and motors and many more. We want to open up this
important field of parallel execution for distributed computing.
Figure 6: possible splitted mesh processing via internet-connected client-nodes
Abstract: VOLPEX -
Parallel Execution in Volunteer environment
Volpex[9-11] has the goal of enabling robust execution of communicating
parallel applications on volunteer PCs. The project developed the
fundamental concept of autonomous redundant processes: a logical
process may have multiple distributed instances that are unaware of
each other, process instances can be replicated, checkpointed or re-
created independently, and individual process instances can fail without
application failure. The overall application progress is dictated by the
state of the fastest active instance of each process. A single replication
framework can potentially provide protection from process/node and
network failures, varying processing speeds, and Byzantine failures
caused by software and hardware errors and malicious hosts. Two
prototype programming frameworks were successfully developed and
validated in this project:
o Volpex Dataspace API: An abstract „dataspace“ with asynchronous
anonymous Put/Get communication operations from autonomous
redundant processes.
o Volpex MPI: A highly failure resistant MPI implementation based on
sender based logging.
A Volpex prototype has been validated and evaluated with NAS and
other benchmarks, a Map-Reduce framework, and a Replica Exchange
Molecular Dynamics code, and interfaces with BOINC.
Figure 7: VOLPEX
Results
Even though a lot of aerospace projects sounds like science-fiction we
lay emphasis on applicable and fundamental work that will influence
current research. So the participants will directly be involved and
success in research can be feed back to the community to gratify them
that leads to a good atmosphere and long-time participation.
Constellation as a platform will leave it to the sub-projects to openly
publish parts or the complete results.
References
[1] BOINC – Berkeley Open Interface for Network Computing - http://boinc.berkeley.edu
[2] DGLR – Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt - http://stuttgart.dglr.de
[3] RNA World – http://rnaworld.de/rnaworld | Rechenkraft.net e.V. - http.//.rechenkraft.net
[4] HyEnD – Hybrid Engine Development - http://www.hybrid-engine-development.de
[5] Google Lunar X-Prize - http://www.glxp.org
[6] MAGE – The Marburg Ad-hoc Grid Environment - http://mage.uni-marburg.de
[7] OpenFOAM – Open Field Operation and Manipulation - http://www.openfoam.com
[8] Ansys – CFX, Fluent - http://www.ansys.com
[9] VOLPEX - Parallel Execution in Volunteer environment - http://volpex.cs.uh.edu/VCP
[10] 'A Robust Communication Framework for Parallel Execution on Volunteer PC Grids', by
Eshwar Rohit, Hien Nguyen, Nagarajan Kanna, Jaspal Subhlok, Edgar Gabriel, Qian Wang,
Margaret S. Cheung, and David Anderson, The 11th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on
Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing , Newport Beach, CA, May 2011.
[11] VolpexMPI: an MPI Library for Execution of Parallel Applications on Volatile Nodes, by
T. LeBlanc, R. Anand, E. Gabriel, and J. Subhlok. In Proc. The 16th EuroPVM/MPI 2009
Conference, Espoo, Finland, 2009. Published as Springer-Verlag LNCS,5759.
Andreas Hornig(1,2), Lars Bausch, Sayandeep Khan,
Maximilian Palm, Uwe Beckert, Sebastian de Cillia,
Matthias Fritzsche, S. Müller
1. Constellation, König-Karl-Str. 27, 70372 Stuttgart, Germany
2. corresponding author: constellation@aerospaceresearch.net
http://aerospaceresearch.net
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