The application to be used was produced by Dr John Sawyer of Monash Mechanical Engineering. Given the relative size of a crack in a circular piece of material, the application produced the number of cycles to tip extension at various crack locations around the circle. The workings of the program were of no real importance to Clustor, as long as it ran on all the machines in the PPME network.

The first step was to modify the application. It accepted only one variable: the relative size of the crack in the material. From this variable it calculated the result for every possible crack position. It was preferred that the application instead take two parameters, both the relative size of the crack and the position of the crack. This meant that the jobs could be better divided amongst the computers on the network, and also meant that not all crack positions had to be calculated if not desired.

Adapting the application to produce only one result and take two inputs was simply a matter of making several minor modifications to the relevant PERL scripts. Once this was done, the application was compiled and the plan files created.