HARNESSing intranet computational power for legacy applications: the case of ship vulnerability evaluation

In this paper we describe our experience in porting a real-world legacy application, namely the statistic evaluation of ship vulnerability, to a parallel execution environment dynamically distributed over the intra-net Of the Italian naval research center (CETENA). More in details, we describe how we leveraged the dynamic, plug-in based metacomputing infrastructure provided by the HARNESS system to reconcile the requirements of a legacy application tightly tied to a specific CAD environment with a grid-like metacomputing environment in order to deploy over the machines connected through an intra-net multiple instances of the application, coordinate their execution, collect the so produced results and merge them into a unified, statistically improved simulation.