Computational steering explained

Computational steering is the practice of manually intervening with an otherwise autonomous computational process, to change its outcome. The term is commonly used within the numerical simulation community, where it more specifically refers to the practice of interactively guiding a computational experiment into some region of interest.

Examples

A simple, but contrived, example of computational steering is:

Some real examples of computational steering are:

System design

Computational steering systems are a manner of feedback control system, where some or all of the feedback is provided interactively by the operator.

All computational steering mechanisms have three fundamental components:

Disambiguation

There appears to be a distinction that the term computational steering is used only when referring to interaction with simulated systems, not operational ones. Further clarification on this point is needed. For example: Vetter (who is apparently well acquainted with the computational steering field[3]) refers to the following practice as interactive steering.

Computational steering software

Notes and References

  1. Seth. Bullock . John Cartlidge . Martin Thompson. Prospects for Computational Steering of Evolutionary Computation. Workshop Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Artificial Life. 131-137. MIT Press. 2002 .
  2. Peter. Love. Jeremy Martin. Steering High Performance Parallel Programs: A Case Study. Communicating Process Architectures 2000. 99–108. IOS Press. 2000 .
  3. Vetter. Jeffrey. Computational Steering Annotated Bibliography. SIGPLAN Notices. 32. 6. 40–44. 1997. 10.1145/261353.261359.
  4. Vetter. Jeffrey. Reed. Daniel. Real-time Performance Monitoring, Adaptive Control, and Interactive Steering of Computational Grids. International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. 14. 357–366. November 2000. 10.1177/109434200001400407.