CloudFlame: Cyberinfrastructure for combustion research

Abstract

Combustion experiments and chemical kinetics simulations generate huge data that is computationally and data intensive. A cloud-based cyber infrastructure known as Cloud Flame is implemented to improve the computational efficiency, scalability and availability of data for combustion research. The architecture consists of an application layer, a communication layer and distributed cloud servers running in a mix environment of Windows, Macintosh and Linux systems. The application layer runs software such as CHEMKIN modeling application. The communication layer provides secure transfer/archive of kinetic, thermodynamic, transport and gas surface data using private/public keys between clients and cloud servers. A robust XML schema based on the Process Informatics Model (Prime) combined with a workflow methodology for digitizing, verifying and uploading data from scientific graphs/tables to Prime is implemented for chemical molecular structures of compounds. The outcome of using this system by combustion researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Clean Combustion Research Center and its collaborating partners indicated a significant improvement in efficiency in terms of speed of chemical kinetics and accuracy in searching for the right chemical kinetic data.