A distributed object infrastructure for interaction and steering

Abstract

This paper presents the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of DIOS, an infrastructure for enabling the runtime monitoring and computational steering of parallel and distributed applications. DIOS enables existing application objects (data structures) to be enhanced with sensors and actuators so that they can be interrogated and controlled at runtime. Application objects can be distributed (spanning many processors) and dynamic (be created, deleted, changed or migrated). Furthermore, DIOS provides a control network that manages the distributed sensors and actuators and enables external discovery, interrogation, monitoring and manipulation of these objects at runtime. DIOS is currently being used to enable interactive monitoring and steering of a wide range of scientific applications, including oil reservoir, compressible turbulence and numerical relativity simulations.