Porting Legacy Engineering Applications onto Distributed NT Systems

In this paper we present our experiences developing two distributed computing applications on NT. In both examples a legacy application is ported from Unix to NT and is then further developed to be a distributed application within the NT environment. We shall present two different approaches to managing the remote execution of tasks. One is a port of a serial vibroacoustic analysis code called PAFEC VibroAcoustic and the other is the parallelisation of the non-linear analysis modules of the LUSAS FE analysis package. We shall show in these two projects that it is technically possible to carry out scientific computing on a distributed NT resource.