On the fly reconfiguration of interactive scientific visualization applications

Abstract

An interactive scientific visualization application is constructed from different codes to implement simulation, data treatment, visualization and interaction parts. The application construction requires support for the assembly of the different parts considering their heterogeneity in the one hand and the need to achieve an efficient application to be run in real time on the other hand. Component-based approach is an interesting paradigm to handle such applications. Moreover in a context of visual analytics, some applications need to be dynamically reconfigured since some components as analysis steps are not persistent and need to be restarted or stopped on the fly. This paper describes a reconfiguration process for ComSA applications, a component based approach dedicated to interactive scientific visualization applications that relies on an exogenous coordination model. This process enables the reconfiguration of running applications. It aims to minimize the number of stopped components during the reconfiguration phase while avoiding the application to crash. It uses the properties of the coordination model to circumscribe the part of the application impacted by the reconfiguration. This region is safely paused, then modified and finally restarted.