Clayworks: A System for Collaborative Real-Time Modeling and High-Performance Simulation

Clayworks is a software system which integrates collaborative real-time modeling and distributed computing. It addresses the challenge of developing a collaborative workspace with a seamless access to high-performance servers. Clayworks allows modeling of virtual clay objects and running computation-intensive deformation simulations for objects crashing into each other. To integrate heterogeneous computational resources, we adopted modern Grid middleware and provided the users with an intuitive graphical interface. We parallelized the computation of simulations using a Higher-Order Component (HOC) which abstracts over the Globus Web service resource framework (WSRF) used to interconnect our worksuite to the computation server. Clayworks is a representative of a large class of demanding systems which combine collaborative modeling with performance-critical computations, e.g., crash-tests or simulations for biological population evolution.