Mobile agent-based computational steering for distributed simulation

Two challenging problems in the area of scientific computation are long computation time and large-scale, distributed, and diverse data sets. As the scale of science and engineering applications rapidly expands, these two problems become more manifest than ever. This paper presents the concept of Mobile Agent-based Computational Steering (MACS) for distributed simulation. The MACS allows users to apply new or modified algorithms to a running application by altering certain sections of the program code without the need of stopping the execution and recompiling the program code. The concept has been validated through an application for dynamic CFD data post processing. The validation results show that the MACS has a great potential to enhance productivity and data manageability of large-scale distributed computational systems.