Analyzing an Ideas Used in Modern HPC Computation Steering

Computation steering is a scientific and technical area which provides methods of understanding a state of running high-performance computing (HPC) programs and performing interactive control over such programs. This work is an analysis of ideas and current status of computation steering. The main idea of computation steering is that computation and visualization are performed simultaneously. By the way, modern HPC systems approached the disbalance: they have much more computing power than storage power. Thus computations cannot output all meaningful data easily. To solve this, steering technologies are used – with idea to run in non-interactive mode, extracting program’s in-memory data and saving it for ordinal post-hoc analysis. This lead to new demands on algorithms of correct data reduction, in purpose of correctness of various following data analysis. Another idea of modern steering is a configuration of parts of visualization pipeline in text files separate from simulation codes. This allows to relatively easy setup data transformations and connections between them and their placement on various locations, including computational nodes. Modern steering systems rely on model: describe simulation data’s life using API and then conFigure in text files what to do with that data in purpose of visualization during simulation.