The Scirun Problem Solving Environment and Computational Steering Software System

Since the introduction of computers, scientists and engineers have attempted to harness their power to simulate complex physical phenomena. Today, the computer is an almost universal tool used in a wide range of scientific and engineering domains. Currently, organizing, running and visualizing a new large-scale simulation still requires hours or days of a researcher’s time. Time and effort required for data input, output and conversion further slows and complicates process. We present the design and application of SCIRun, a Problem Solving Environment (PSE), and a computational steering software system. SCIRun allows a scientist or engineer to interactively steer a computation, changing parameters, recomputing, and then revisualizing all within the same programming environment. The tightly integrated modular environment provided by SCIRun allows computational steering to be applied to a broad range of advanced scientific computations. This dissertation demonstrates that computational steering can be a useful tool in computational science, engineering, and medicine applications and that this utility is obtained by providing a flexible and efficient infrastructure whereby disparate computational tools can be used in a single, focused environment. Furthermore, we demonstrate that using such an environment, a scientist or engineer can rapidly investigate the solution space for iterative computational design problems. Four applications are demonstrated: Torso defibrillator modeling, Monte Carlo global illumination, a computational fluid dynamics application, and a simulation of atmospheric diffusion. These applications were selected to explore the gamut of a flexible and extensible problem solving environment.