Extending the Scirun Problem Solving Environment to Large-scale Applications

To make the most of current advanced computing technologies, experts in particular areas of science and engineering should be supported by sophisticated tools for carrying out computational experiments. The complexity of individual components of such tools should be hidden from them so they may concentrate on solving the specific problem within their field of expertise. One class of such tools are Problem Solving Environments (PSEs). The contribution of this paper refers to the idea of integration of an interactive computing framework applicable to different engineering applications into the SCIRun PSE in order to enable interactive real-time response of the computational model to user interaction even for large-scale problems. While the SCIRun PSE allows for real-time computational steering, we propose extending this functionality to a wider range of applications and larger scale problems. With only minor code modifications the proposed system allows each module scheduled for execution in a dataflow-based simulation to be automatically interrupted and re-scheduled. This rescheduling allows one to keep the relation between the user interaction and its immediate effect transparent independent of the problem size, thus, allowing for the intuitive and interactive exploration of simulation results.