The Distributed Engineering Framework TENT

The paper describes TENT, a component-based framework for the integration of technical applications. TENT allows the engineer to design, automate, control, and steer technical workflows interactively. The applications are therefore encapsulated in order to build components which conform to the TENT component architecture. The engineer can combine the components to workflows in a graphical user interface. The framework manages and controls a distributed workflow on arbitrary computing resources within the network. Due to the utilization of CORBA, TENT supports all state-of-the-art programming languages, operating systems, and hardware architectures. It is designed to deal with parallel and sequential programming paradigms, as well as with massive data exchange. TENT is used for workflow integration in several projects, for CFD workflows in turbine engine and aircraft design, in the modeling of combustion chambers, and for virtual automobile prototyping.