DiScOvEr

“Discover is a virtual, interactive and collaborative PSE that enables geographically distributed scientists and engineers to collaboratively monitor, and control high performance parallel/distributed applications using web-based portals. Its primary objective is to transform high-performance simulation into true research and instructional modalities…”

Simulations are playing an increasingly critical role in all areas of science and engineering. As the complexity and computational costs of these simulations grows, it has become important for the scientists and engineers to be able to monitor the progress of these simulations, and to control or steer them at runtime. The utility and cost-effectiveness of these simulations can be greatly increased by transforming the traditional batch simulations into more interactive ones.Closing the loop between the user and the simulations enables the experts to drive the discovery process by observing intermediate results, by changing parameters to lead the simulation to more interesting domains, play what-if games, detect and correct unstable situations, and terminate uninteresting runs early.Furthermore, the increased complexity and multi-disciplinary nature of these simulations necessitates a collaborative effort among multiple, usually geographically distributed scientists/engineers. As a result, collaboration-enabling tools are critical for transforming simulations into true research modalities.

The primary goal of the DISCOVER collaboratory is to bring large distributed simulations to the scientists’/engineers’ desktop by providing collaborative web-based portals for interaction and control. DISCOVER provides a 3-tier architecture composed of detachable thin-clients at the front-end, a network of web servers in the middle, and a control network of sensors, actuators, interaction agents superimposed on the application at the back-end.The interaction servers build on servlet technology and enable clients to connect to, and collaboratively interact with registered applications using a conventional browser. The application control network enables sensors and actuators to be encapsulated within, and directly deployed with the computational objects. Interaction agents resident at each computational node register the interaction objects and export their interaction interfaces. The application interaction gateway manages the overall interaction through the control network of interaction agents and objects. It uses the Java Native Interface to create Java proxy objects that mirror the computational objects and allow them to be directly accessed by the interaction web-server. Security and authentication services are provided using customizable access control lists built on the SSL-based secure server.

Key Features