A Microservices Approach for Parallel Applications Design: A Case Study for CFD Simulation in Geoscience Domain

Current geoscience applications face two major challenges – the integration with numerous diverse sensor devices and the use in real-time use case scenarios. Whilst the challenge of service integration is addressed by the concept of Cyber-Physical systems, which aims to incorporate sensor data in application workflows, the usage of High Performance Computers helps minimize the execution time to fulfill the real time scenarios requirements. However, the existing programming models do not allow scientific workflows to take advantage of both technologies simultaneously. This paper contribution offers an approach to encapsulation of workflowbased applications into services, which are flexible enough to run on heterogeneous, distributed infrastructures spanning over both industrial sensor services and parallel computing systems. The approach is demonstrated on a computational fluid dynamics simulation study of aerodynamic processes in complex underground mine ventilation networks.