Above: The SCIRun PSE

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PowerApps (below) replace the multitude of generic dataflow user interface (UI) windows with a single customized interface. The most important controls from the dataflow interface are linked to contextually labeled variables on the PowerApp UI, while the other dataflow variables are assigned appropriate defaults, reducing the visual complexity and generic labels of the dataflow UI windows. the UI components are organized into logical groups and assists the user in smoothly progressing through the stages of the application.

SCIRun The most effective approach to using computational tools is to integrate computing functions into one seamless, ubiquitous environment. SCIRun is that tool. Best described as a computational workbench, with SCIRun, all aspects of the modeling, simulation, and visualization processes are linked and controlled graphically within the context of a single application program. By tackling such a large integrated systems approach, the SCI Institute draws upon its multidisciplinary approach to science and research in geometric modeling, simulation, scientific visualization and software environments. SCIRun began development in 1992 and was the original implementation of the computational framework. This computational workbench infrastructure has been the origin of many significant application-specific “packages.” The two major examples are the DOE sponsored Uintah system (top, currently operating within the CSAFE project), and the NIH sponsored BioPSE system (bottom). The target applications of the Uintah project are combustion, computational fluid dynamics, and mechanical modeling which is implemented on large-scale, and distributed with shared memory architectures. The primary goal of the BioPSE project was to create software for geometric modeling, simulation, and visualization for solving bioelectric field problems, and to make the source code for these problem solving environments publicly available to the scientific community. We anticipate that the collection of these packages will grow, as the advantages of the SCIRun infrastructure become available to scientists and engineers of all disciplines. PowerApps Historically, one of the major hurdles to SCIRun/BioPSE becoming a tool for the scientist or engineer has been SCIRun's dataflow interface. While visual programming is natural for computer scientists, who are accustomed to writing software and building algorithmic pipelines, it is overly cumbersome for application scientists. Even when a dataflow network implements a specific application (such as the forward bioelectric field simulation network provided with BioPSE and detailed in the BioPSE Tutorial), the user interface (UI) components of the network are presented to the user in separate UI windows, without any semantic context for their settings. Historically, there has not been a way to present the filename entries in their semantic context, for example to indicate that one entry should identify the electrodes input file and the other should identify the finite element mesh file. With the 1.20 release of BioPSE/SCIRun, PowerApps were introduced. A PowerApp is a customized interface built atop a dataflow application network. The dataflow network controls the execution and synchronization of the modules that comprise the application, but the generic user interface windows are replaced with entries that are placed in the context of a single application-specific interface window. There are currently four PowerApps available: BioFEM (for finite element problems); BioTensor (for post-processing and visualization of DWI MRI data); BioImage (for the processing and visualization of 3-dimensional data); and FusionViewer (for visualizing 3D scalar and vector magnetic fusion data).