An Internet-based computing platform for the boundary element method

Computers combined with the Internet are dramatically changing the engineering practices in design and analysis. More and more engineering software applications are moving to the Internet, prompted by the promising advantages, such as easy access for users everywhere with an Internet connection, easy upgrade of the software, easy control of the software. All these advantages will contribute to faster and cost-effective engineering software development and applications. Successful applications of the Internet computing depend largely on the speed of data transfer on the network. The boundary element method (BEM) has the inherent advantages over other domain-based numerical methods, because the size of the BEM model files are always, considerably smaller, leading to faster data transfer on the current network. In this paper, a successful investigation in implementing the BEM on the Internet is presented. A BEM code for 2D elastostatic problems is used as the first solver in this work. A graphical-user interface (GUI) for the pre- and post-processing using Java, which provides platform-independent applications, is developed and implemented on the Internet. Demonstration problems using the developed platform clearly show the feasibility of the Internet-based computing and the potentials of this platform for future BEM development with further research. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.