Integrating data management into engineering applications

Engineering design search and optimisation is the process whereby engineering modelling and analysis are exploited to yield improved designs. It is a computationally and data intensive process - an application domain well-suited to Grid technology. Many on-going activities focus on utilising computing resources on the grid. However, it is equally important to manage efficiently the vast and varied amount of data produced by grid applications. In this paper we describe the tools we have implemented in the Geodise project to transparently integrate database technologies into engineering applications. The toolkit has been incorporated into Matlab which is popular in the engineering community for its ease of use and rich functionality. We adopt open standards and a service oriented approach to leverage existing database technologies. Databases are accessed through web services and Globus is used for file transfer and authentication. The Geodise data management architecture consists of flexible, modular components which can be utilized by higher level applications for managing data on the Grid. We demonstrate our toolkit in the context of an industrially relevant exemplar problem.