EPSN : a Computational Environment for Legacy Parallel and Distributed Simulations
Olivier CoulaudINRIA Bordeaux - Sud-oeust
Laboratoire commun INRIA-CERFACS
Tuesday, March 16th, CERFACS Conference Room - 15h00
Abstract.
The computational steering is an effort to make the typical simulation work-flow (modeling, computing, analyzing) affordable and more efficient. We aim at providing online visualization and interactive steering of concurrent computational processes. The online visualization is very often useful to monitor and to detect possible errors in long time simulations.
The interactive steering allows the user to change the simulation parameters on-the-fly and to immediately visualize the feedback. Thus, the scientist gains additional insights on the simulation regarding the cause-and-effect relationship. EPSN (Environment for the Steering of Parallel Numerical Simulations) is a software framework that enables us to steer parallel and distributed simulations with visualization systems that can be parallel as well.
The framework is based on an abstract model that permits us to steer “safely” legacy parallel or coupled simulations. It describes the application in terms of execution flow, complex distributed data objects and user interactions. Thanks to this abstraction, we define a coordination algorithm that allows us to efficiently interact with the simulation and to overcome the time-coherence problem raised by coupled simulations.
In this talk, we first describe the difficulty to steer parallel and distributed simulations. We illustrate why an abstract model is needed, then we detail our model. Finally, we present some examples on the steering of legacy codes.
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