Pratt & Whitney

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Contact:
Bob Walter
Pratt & Whitney Engines
Division of United Technologies Corp
One N.E. Exec. Park
Burlington, MA 01803-5055
Phone: +1-617- 270-1378
Email: rhw@i-kinetics.com

Tools Used:
IONA's Orbix™, CORBA®

Description:
Pratt&Whitney has rolled out a CORBA-based Virtual Engine application to multiple-sites on a full production basis.

The Component Ware Consortium (CWC), a cooperative of seven leading technology companies who focus their efforts on distributed object computing, was awarded four million dollars under the U.S. Goverment Technology Reinvestment Project (TRP) to facilitate the development of reuseable software. The seven consortium members include: BBN, Hueristicrats Research, I-Kinetics, IONA, Netlinks (now Semaphore), Pratt & Whitney, and Sunsoft, Inc. The TRP is a federal initiative to integrate commercial and defense sectors through cooperative R&D and commercialization of critical high-technology. CWC’s goal is to package data applications as standard, reuseable software components that will use emerging distributed object frameworks such as CORBA.

I-Kinetics is acting as the facilitator for the Virtual Engine Application program at UTC’s Hartford, CT-based Pratt & Whitney. As part of the joint venture for the Virtual Engine Application P& W would receive 100 CORBA (Orbix) Run-time and 12 developers licenses. Due to the success of the project, Pratt & Whitney purchased a site license for 3000 run-times plus additional developers. Additionally, they have chosen not to continue the project as part of the CWC effort. Instead, they plan to make further advances to the project in-house, and leverage their competitive advantage. Boeing and Lockheed, after experiencing the added value of the Pratt & Whitney application, are expected to join the CWC.

Technical Details:
The Common Object Request Broker architecture (CORBA) has shown its ability to improve distributed parallel processing. Beta testing of CORBA Parallel Distributed Optimization Toolkit with the 3D External Airfoil has resulted in the following execution statistics: 9000 executions of a 3D single-stage high-pressure turbine ran in approximately 52 hours across 40 workstations. This amounts to 40X performance increase over sequential analysis and is near linear in its scaleability. The reliability of the system was 100% and can be attributed to the built-in exception handling features provided by CORBA.

In order to rapidly encapsulate trusted component analyses, the CORBA IDL is being used to wrap legacy systems for use as computational servers by CORBA client objects. The new technology enables the monolithic FORTRAN systems to be integrated together with variable fidelity engine object models. This minimizes re-engineering of the older analyses into the new model environment and facilitates parallel distribution of simulation scenarios across the network.