Presentation
Bridging Gaps in Simulation Analysis through a General Purpose, Bidirectional Steering Interface with Ascent
DescriptionThis paper presents a novel, general-purpose interface for adding interactive human-in-the-loop steering controls to existing simulation codes. The design is agnostic to any specific in situ analysis and visualization library, though our reference implementation is based on Ascent -- a common in situ visualization and analysis library for large-scale simulations. Traditional in situ analysis and visualization workflows are typically automated through trigger mechanisms that execute as simulations reach certain predefined states (e.g. every N timesteps, simulation parameters become unstable, etc.). Although such automated in situ tasks suffice for many real-world applications, we demonstrate that a complementary interactive interface can significantly boost scientific productivity. With two use case simulations, we show how our approach enables scientists to pause and resume simulations, allowing for interactive adjustments to the simulation state between timesteps. This method avoids the overhead of cold restarting, enabling faster case setup, troubleshooting, and exploration.
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