Runtime analysis tools for parallel scientific applications
Abstract
This paper describes the Alpaca runtime tools. These tools leverage the component infrastructure of the Cactus Framework in a novel way to enable runtime steering, monitoring, and interactive control of a simulation. Simulation data can be observed graphically, or by inspecting values of variables. When GPUs are available, images can be generated using volume ray casting on the live data. In response to observed error conditions or automatic triggers, users can pause the simulation to modify or repair data, or change runtime parameters. In this paper we describe the design of our implementation of these features and illustrate their value with three use cases. © 2011 ACM.