After the successful BOF at SC15, we hosted again a Birds-of-a-Feather session on Interactivity in Supercomputing.
The session consisted of talks from John Stone (UIUC), Thomas Schulthess (CSCS) and Mike Ringenburg (Cray) and demonstrated the breath of activities at all the levels of the HPC ecosystem.
One of the outcomes of the lively discussion was that there exists a range of solutions, but most of them are accessible only to a small group of users at a specific site. This fragmentation of the toolsets makes adoption even harder, but at the same time illustrates the importance of the problem.
The group agreed that there is a need for a workshop collecting the current state of the art in interactive HPC and to orchestrate future activities.