Computational steering in realitygrid

The RealityGrid project (http://www.realitygrid.org) aims both to enable the discovery of new materials through integrated experiments and to understand the behaviour of physical systems based on the properties of their microscopic components using diverse simulation methods spanning many time and length scales. A central theme of RealityGrid is the facilitation of distributed and collaborative steering of parallel simulation codes and simultaneous on-line, high-end visualisation. In this paper, we review the motivations for computational steering and introduce the RealityGrid steering library and associated software. We then outline the capabilities of the library and describe the service-oriented architecture of the latest implementation, in which the steering controls of the application are exposed through an OGSI-compliant Grid service