Cloudization of An In-house Discrete Element Simulation Platform

Cloudization of An In-house Discrete Element Simulation Platform

VEDO(VErsatile Discrete Objects simulation system) is a parallel computing platform developed by the Department of Civil Engineering at National Taiwan University(NTU) in 2005 to address the need for Discrete Element Simulation(DES) in the field of civil engineering. It was released as open-source software under the 3-clause BSD license in 2009, and it is currently comaintained by the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering(NCREE) under the National Applied Research Laboratories(NARLabs) in Taiwan. This paper explores a procedure for transforming VEDO to cloud computing with information technologies such as unified data type, XML-based processing unit, and graphic/web-based user interface. The integration of the Python programming language, Qt application framework, and Flask web framework are also illustrated. The resulting new VEDO system has been applied to teaching college students at NTU, and the experience is useful for researchers interested in developing their own cloud computing platform.