Computational Steering of Interactive Material Flow Simulations Available to Purchase

In this paper we present the integration of computational steering techniques into the interactive material flow simulation d³FACT insight. This kind of simulation differs from traditional, long running High Performance Computing (HPC) simulations such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) or Molecular Dynamics in many aspects. One very important aspect is that these simulations run in (soft) real-time, thus the corresponding visualization needs to be updated after every step of the simulation. In turn, this allows to let changes, made through the visualization, impact the actual simulation and again, to see the effects in visualization. To allow this kind of control over the simulation and to further provide a flexible basis to integrate several instances of simulation, visualization and steering components, we used and enhanced a self-developed computational steering platform, which fits best for the needs of highly interactive and distributed simulations. Thereby we are able to realize multi-user and comparative scenarios which were not possible in this field of simulations before.