The scirun problem solving environment and computational steering software system
Christopher R. Johnson, Steven G. Parker · 1999
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.