CFD Cyber Education Service Using Cyberinfrastructure for e-Science

In Korea, prospective college students are increasingly avoiding natural science and engineering. Government is trying to develop an information communication technology (ICT) infrastructure contributed to the encouragement of learner-centered education and to the qualitative enhancement of academic research. It also contributed to the increase in the use of ICT in various areas and to the remarkable improvement in the level of information utilization. In this paper, we introduce a cyber education system for aerospace engineering, which is named e-AIRS. e-AIRS, an abbreviation of 'e-Science Aerospace Integrated Research System', is a cyber-infrastructure based portal system to support the aerodynamics engineering processes on the e-science environment. The Web portal interface is implemented as a portlet component model on top of the gridsphere framework, and these portlets can be reusable. The system provides CFD simulations, remote experimental service, and collaborative and integrative study between computation and experiment through the Web. The system helps students to understand the full simulation process of aerodynamics engineering. We conducted a survey of about 150 students at the Seoul National University and Konkuk University in Korea. According to the survey, 94 percent said the system helped to understand the whole process of CFD, and more than 90 percent of the students said e-AIRS portal provided a good functionality, convenience, and user interface.