Interactive Computing Framework for Engineering Applications

Abstract

Problem statement: Even though the computational steering state-of-the-art environments allow users to embed their simulation codes as a module for an interactive steering without the necessity for their own expertise in high-performance computing and visualisation, e.g., these environments are limited in their possible applications and mostly entail heavy code changes in order to integrate the existing code. Approach: In this study, we introduce an integration framework for engineering applications that supports distributed computations as well as visualization on-the-fly in order to reduce latency and enable a high degree of interactivity with only minor code alterations involved. Moreover, we tackle the problem of long communication delays in the case of huge data advent, which occur due to rigid coupling of simulation back-ends with visualization front-ends and handicap a user in exploring intuitively the relation of cause and effect. Results: The results for the first test cases are encouraging, both showing that we obtain excellent speedup in parallel scenarios and proving that the overhead introduced by the framework itself is negligible. Conclusion/Recommendations: Testing the case involving massively parallel simulation, as well as the integration of the framework into several parallel engineering applications are part of our imminent research.