Development of Advanced Cyber Education System Based on Grid

Modern aerodynamics has been revolutionized by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) while most courses are taught with a traditional lecture approach complimented with some combination of homework, labs, and exams. In this paper, we introduce an advanced cyber education system for aerospace engineering, which is named e-AIRS. e-AIRS, an abbreviation of ´e-Science Aerospace Integrated Research System´, is a grid based portal system to support the aerodynamics engineering processes on the e-Science environment. The Web portal interface is implemented as aportlet component model on top of the Gridsphere Framework, and these portlets can be reusable. The system provides CFD simulations, remote experimental service, and collaborative and integrative study between computation and experiment through the Web. The system helps students to understand the full simulation process of aerodynamics engineering. We conducted a survey of about 150 students at the Seoul National University and Konkuk University in Korea. According to the survey, 94 percent said the system helped to understand the whole process of CFD, and more than 90 percent of the students said e-AIRS portal provided a good functionality, convenience, and user interface.