User-friendly scheduling tools for large-scale simulation experiments

Planning and steering numerical experiments that involve many simulations are difficult tasks to automate. We describe how a simulation scheduling tool can help experimenters submit and revoke simulation jobs on the basis of the most up to date partial results and resource estimates. We show how ideas such as pre- and post-conditions; interrupt handling; rapid experiment schema creation; and sparse parameter cross-products can be used to make a generalisable and user-friendly scheduling toolset. We describe our prototype in the context of typical long-running computational experiments of a complex networks simulation problem.