Use of e-Science Environment on CFD Education

‘e-Science’ represents the global collaborations of people and shared resources to solve new and challenging problems in science and engineering (Hey & Trefethen, 2003) on the basis of the IT infrastructure, typically referred to as the Grid (Foster & Kesselman, 1999). As we can easily infer, e-Science initially meant a virtual environment where a new and challengeable research can be accomplished using latest infrastructures. That virtual environment usually has a form of a web portal page or an independent application with a bunch of computer scientific components inside: high-end application researches include large-scale computations for complex multi-physical mechanisms, coupled works of computation and experiments for design-to-development processes, and/or data-intensive researches. The infrastructure consists of computational and experimental facilities, valuable datasets, knowledge, and so on. Researchers can be referred to as a core component of e-Science environment as their discussions and collaborations are promoted by, managed by and integrated to the environment. Meanwhile, the meaning of ‘e-Science’ is becoming broader nowadays. Though e-Science first intended to enrich high-end research activities, it is soon proven to be also effective on academic activities as a cyber education system. (On the other hand, use on inter-disciplinary collaborative researches is not much vitalized as expected, because of diverse preference on internal workflow, I/O and interface among research domains.) Thus, the term ‘e-Science’ is rather used to represent ‘all scientific activities on high performance computing and experimental facilities with the aid of user-friendly interface and system middleware’ these days. As a virtual academic system for aerospace engineering, ‘e-AIRS’ (e-Science Aerospace Integrated Research System) has been designed and developed since 2005. After three years’ development, e-AIRS educational system is finally open, where non-experts can intuitively conduct the full process of computational and experimental fluid dynamic study. Also, the