Overcoming engineering challenges of providing an effective user interface to a large scale distributed synthetic environment on the US teragrid: a systems engineering success story

Over recent years’ large-scale distributed synthetic environment enterprises have been evolving in a diverse range of scientific and engineering fields. These computer modelling and simulation systems are increasing in scale and dimension in order to allow scientists and engineers to explore the attributes and emergent properties of a given system design. Within the field of computational science, the grid facilitates very large-scale collaborative simulation enterprises. The grid is similar to distributed interactive simulation/high level architecture (DIS/HLA) in that it supports interconnectivity but differs in the sense that it supports intercommunication of large super computing resources. An important factor in the rapid adoption of the grid has been its role in enabling access to significant supercomputing resources not usually available at a single institution. However, the major challenge for the grid has been the lack of an effective and ubiquitous interface to the huge computational resource (which can comprise over 6000 CPUs distributed across the globe) at any time and from any location. This paper describes a unique user interface built on systems engineering principles and practices to solve the problem of delivering real-time interaction (from lightweight computing devices such as personal digital assistants, commonly known as tablet devices, to high end computing platforms) with simulations delivering high resolution 3D images. The application of our work has far reaching benefits for many sectors including: aerospace, medical informatics, engineering design, distributed simulation, and modelling.