Computational fluid dynamics simulations of relevance to jet-engine
design, for instance, are extremely computationally demanding and the
use of large-scale distributed computing will allow the solution of problems
that cannot be tackled using current resources. It is often appropriate
to leave the large datasets generated by CFD codes local to the
compute resource in use at the time. This naturally leads to a distributed
database of results that will need to be federated as a coherent resource
for the engineering community. We describe the use of Globus and Condor
within Cambridge for sharing computer resources, progress on defining
XML standards for the annotation of CFD datasets and a distributed
database framework for them
