A distributed object infrastructure for interaction and steering

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