Section: Software

EPSN

EPSN (Environment for Computational Steering) is a software environment for the steering of legacy parallel-distributed simulations with simple GUI or more complex (possibly parallel) visualization programs (see Figure 1 ). In order to make a legacy simulation steerable, the user annotates the sourcecode with the EPSN API. These annotations provide the EPSN environment with two kinds of information: the description of the program structure according to a Hierarchical Task Model (HTM) and the description of the distributed data that will be remotely accessible. EPSN provides a distributed data model, that handles common scientific objects such as parameters, structured grids, particles/atoms and unstructured meshes. It is then possible to dynamically connect EPSN with a client program, that provides a GUI with some visualization & interaction features, as for instance SIMONE (SImulation MONitoring for Epsn). Once a client is connected, it interacts with the simulation via EPSN API. It is possible : 1) to control the execution flow of the remote simulation; 2) to access/modify its data onthefly; and 3) finally to invoke advanced user-defined routines in the simulation. The current version of EPSN is fully based on CORBA for communication on heterogeneous system and VTK/Paraview for visualization. A new release of EPSN, that will be fully based on MPI to handle efficient communication, is currently under development. A prototype is already working.

Figure 1. EPSN: software environment for $M\times N$ computational steering.

EPSN has been supported by the ACI-GRID program (grant number PPL02-03), the ARC RedGRID, the ANR MASSIM (grant number ANR-05-MMSA-0008-03) and the ANR CIS NOSSI (2007). More informations are available on our web site: http://www.labri.fr/projet/epsn . This software is publicy available at Inria Gforge (http://epsn.gforge.inria.fr ).