This paper aims to discuss 30 years of evolution of technical design tools (software and architecture) in GE Oil&Gas. Most important changes are highlighted, as well as some promising evolutionary paths. Legacy codes are the heritage of industrial companies from 70s and 80s. FORTRAN was used in order to automate the calculation the engineers had to perform to design turbines or compressors. The results of legacy codes were files that contain several information’s, relevant to stage geometry and performances, which could be used to generate drawings or to evaluate machines operability. However this large amount of data was spread on different computer and each designer was keeping track manually of the files modification. In order to better archive those data in 2000 most of the companies started to use databases and created modern user interfaces: in this way the users can dialog with a friendly interface and retrieve the data in a more organized format. The discussion on how to link the legacy codes and the database is still on going. Some GUIs are installed on different computer and interact on a centralized database, but in 2010 a more robust architecture started to be used transforming the GUI and the calculation in a centralized system based on web application. This allowed creating a solid and scalable environment since the legacy code and DB can be installed in servers reachable through the net by each user, simplifying the installation and maintenance issue. With INDUSTRIAL INTERNET advent more interaction between tools is required and Application Programming Interfaces (API) permit to have a direct interaction among tools without human interface, and the applications can directly interact with other programs.
Developing scalable software infrastructure for data storage and processing for computational biology problems
