Research And Implementation Of The Data Transfer And Management In Distributed Computing

Supported by the theory of finite element analysis and computer science, traditional finite element analysis softwares that are mainly used on a single computer have become a powerful tool to solve complicated engineering problems. One of them is the JIFEX software system, which is developed by the department of engineering mechanics of Dalian University of Technology. However, due to the limit of CPU's speed and memory capacity, large scale engineering analysis performed by the traditional FEA software always costs lengthy computing time, and even results in the failure of the analysis. This problem has become the bottleneck in applying traditional FEA software to engineering practice. In order to remedy this deficiency, a great deal of research work has been done on it. One of the successful researches is to combine the traditional FEA techniques with the distributed computing theory and techniques that maturate gradually with the development of computer network technology. On one hand, through computer network, distributed computing techniques can integrate independent computers into a collaborative entity, thereby greatly enhancing their calculating speed as a whole, and thus can deal with the enormous number of calculation to some extent. On the other hand, data-sharing mechanism in distributed computing environment can effectively achieve the storage of a large number of data that exists in large scale engineering analysis. Besides, distributed computing system still possesses the merits of expansibility and flexibility of the architecture. As a result, combining the distributed computing technology with the traditional FEA techniques and developing distributed FEA software can tackle the application bottleneck of traditional FEA software and expand its usage in engineering analysis.How to accomplish the data transmission among various computers is one of the critical problems in the development of distributed FEA software, because it is the prior condition of achieving the connection, the mutual operation and the cooperative work between the independent computers. Based on demonstrating the feasibility and necessity of achieving distributed FEA computing according to the client/server pattern, this paper establishes a prototype system and develops data transmission and management function. According to the characteristic of the data in FEA, a transmission protocol is defined to improve its efficiency. With the help of the socket programming technique that supports the TCP/IP protocol, a real time data transmission model is presented to address the data synchronization issues. In order to handle the problem existing in the storage of a large number of data, integrated data management method has been investigated in this paper. The successful implementation will enhance the distributed computing ability of JIFEX.