Computational steering

About: Computational steering is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 337 publications have been published within this topic receiving 5176 citations.

SCIRun: A Scientific Programming Environment for Computational Steering

Abstract: We present the design, implementation and application of SCIRun, a scientific programming environment that allows the interactive construction, debugging and steering of large scale scientific computations. Using this "computational workbench," a scientist can design and modify simulations interactively via a dataflow programming model. SCIRun enables scientists to design and modify models and automatically change parameters and boundary conditions as well as the mesh discretization level needed for an accurate numerical solution. As opposed to the typical "off-line" simulation mode - in which the scientist manually sets input parameters, computes results, visualizes the results via a separate visualization package, then starts again at the beginning - SCIRun "closes the loop" and allows interactive steering of the design and computation phases of the simulation. To make the dataflow programming paradigm applicable to large scientific problems, we have identified ways to avoid the excessive memory use inherent in standard dataflow implementations, and have implemented fine-grained dataflow in order to further promote computational efficiency. In this paper, we describe applications of the SCIRun system to several problems in computational medicine. In addition, an we have included an interactive demo program in the form of an application of SCIRun system to a small electrostatic field problem.

Cumulvs: Providing Fault Toler. Ance, Visualization, and Steer Ing of Parallel Applications

Abstract: The use of visualization and computational steering can often assist scientists in analyzing large-scale scientific applications. Fault tolerance to failures is of great impor tance when running on a distributed system. However, the details of implementing these features are complex and tedious, leaving many scientists with inadequate develop ment tools. CUMULVS is a library that enables program mers to easily incorporate interactive visualization and computational steering into existing parallel programs. Built on the PVM virtual machine framework, CUMULVS is portable and interoperable with all the computer archi tectures that PVM works with-a growing list that now stands at about 60 architectures. The CUMULVS library is divided into two pieces: one for the application program and one for the possibly commercial, visualization, and steering front end. Together, these two libraries encom pass all the connection and data protocols needed to dynamically attach multiple, independent viewer front ends to a running parallel application. Viewer programs can also steer one or more user-defined parameters to "close the loop" for computational experiments and analy ses. CUMULVS allows the programmer to specify user- directed checkpoints for saving an important program state in case of failures and also provides a mechanism to migrate tasks across heterogeneous machine architec tures to achieve improved performance. Details of the CUMULVS design goals and compromises as well as future directions are given.

A survey of computational steering environments

Abstract: Computational steering is a powerful concept that allows scientists to interactively control a computational process during its execution. In this paper, a survey of computational steering environments for the on-line steering of ongoing scientific and engineering simulations is presented. These environments can be used to create steerable applications for model exploration, algorithm experimentation, or performance optimization. For each environment the scope is identified, the architecture is summarized, and the concepts of the user interface is described. The environments are compared and conclusions and future research issues are given.

The SCIRun computational steering software system

Abstract: We present the design, implementation and application of SCIRun, a scientific programming environment that allows the interactive construction, debugging, and steering of large-scale scientific computations. Using this “computational workbench,” a scientist can design and modify simulations interactively via a dataflow programming model. SCIRun enables scientists to design and modify model geometry, interactively change simulation parameters and boundary conditions, and interactively visualize geometric models and simulation results. We discuss the ubiquitous roles SCIRun plays as a computational tool (e.g. resource manager, thread scheduler, development environment), and how we have applied an object oriented design (implemented in C++) to the scientific computing process. Finally, we demonstrate the application of SCIRun to large scale problems in computational medicine.