Abstract
To harness the potential of advanced computing technologies, efficient (real time) analysis of large amounts of data is as essential as are front-line simulations. In order to optimise this process, experts need to be supported by appropriate tools that allow to interactively guide both the computation and data exploration of the underlying simulation code. The main challenge is to seamlessly feed the user requirements back into the simulation. State-of-the-art attempts to achieve this, have resulted in the insertion of so-called check- and break-points at fixed places in the code. Depending on the size of the problem, this can still compromise the benefits of such an attempt, thus, preventing the experience of real interactive computing. To leverage the concept for a broader scope of applications, it is essential that a user receives an immediate response from the simulation to his or her changes. Our generic integration framework, targeted to the needs of the computational engineering domain, supports distributed computations as well as on-the-fly visualisation in order to reduce latency and enable a high degree of interactivity with only minor code modifications. Namely, the regular course of the simulation coupled to our framework is interrupted in small, cyclic intervals followed by a check for updates. When new data is received, the simulation restarts automatically with the updated settings (boundary conditions, simulation parameters, etc.). To obtain rapid, albeit approximate feedback from the simulation in case of perpetual user interaction, a multi-hierarchical approach is advantageous. Within several different engineering test cases, we will demonstrate the flexibility and the effectiveness of our approach.
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Acknowledgements
The overall work has been financially supported by the Munich Centre of Advanced Computing (MAC) and the International Graduate School of Science and Engineering (IGSSE) at Technische Universität München and we would like to gratefully acknowledge that. The work related to SCIRun PSE was made possible in part by software from the NIH/NIGMS Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing, 2P41 RR0112553-12. It was accomplished in winter 2011/12 during a 3-month research visit of Jovana Knežević to the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute, University of Utah. She would like to express her appreciation and gratitude to Prof. Chris Johnson for inviting her and all the researchers for fruitful discussions. Furthermore, she would like to thank Hermilo Hernández and Tatjana Jevremović at Nuclear Engineering Program, University of Utah, and Thomas Fogal from SCI Institute, in collaboration with whom the work on the AGENT project was done.
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Knežević, J., Mundani, RP., Rank, E. (2013). A High-Performance Interactive Computing Framework for Engineering Applications. In: Bader, M., Bungartz, HJ., Weinzierl, T. (eds) Advanced Computing. Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, vol 93. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38762-3_9
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