PFI-TT: Using Science Gateways to Enable Greater Access to High Performance Computing in Support of Advanced Manufacturing

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this PFI project will be to help streamline the design, manufacturing, and product lifecycle management processes in highly regulated industries such as aerospace and medical device manufacturing by enabling broader use of modeling and simulation tools at all phases of a product?s lifecycle. Today, product develop and manufacturing in many highly regulated industries is a long, expensive process that carries substantial commercial risks to manufacturers if products fail to reach markets and substantial personal risks to customers if the products fail in operations. If used properly, modeling and simulation methods can substantially reduce these risks and provide deeper insight into poorly understood physical processes in a product?s lifecycle. However, these sophisticated methods are not as deeply adopted throughout industry supply chains as is needed to realize the benefits. The work proposed here will use the methods of distributed systems, cyberinfrastructure, and information technology to broaden and simplify access to high performance computing resources and advanced modeling and simulation software, increasing the integration of advanced manufacturing with the innovations of computer science and cybersecurity in distributed systems, attracting and training a computer science-grounded workforce that can help enable a transformation in the manufacturing sector. The proposed project will address these challenges by leveraging the investment by the National Science Foundation in science gateways, which provide end user environments that simplify and secure access to advanced modeling and simulation software on high performance computing resources. The proposed project has a high degree of intellectual merit as it takes science gateways a step forward in engineering and cybersecurity maturity. This project will develop a general approach for creating Application Programming Interfaces to science gateway middleware out of reconfigurable building blocks that can be mapped to the requirements of different user environments. These methods will be applied to the development of programming interfaces and data models derived from abstract models of a trusted digital commons science gateway developed in a private sector/academic partner collaboration. This gateway will allow the secure creation/sharing of executable models, support the process of reproducible verification of modeling and simulation methods, support the validation of a particular model for a particular physical product or process, and allow systematic exploration of uncertainty quantification in the models under diverse external conditions. Together, these capabilities will enable greater collaboration between manufacturers in a supply chain, manufacturers across industrial sectors, and between manufacturers and regulatory agencies. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.