As simulation codes become more powerful and more interactive, it is increasingly desirable to monitor a simulation in-situ, performing not only visualization but also analysis of the incoming data as it is generated. Monitoring or post-processing simulation data in-situ has obvious advantage over the conventional approach of saving to--and reloading data from--the file system; the time and space it takes to write and then read the data from disk is a significant bottleneck for both the simulation and subsequent post-processing steps. Furthermore, the simulation may be stopped, modified, or potentially steered, thus conserving CPU resources. We present in this thesis a loosely coupled approach that enables a simulation to transfer data to a visualization server via the use of in-memory files. We show in this study how the interface, implemented on top of a widely used hierarchical data format (HDF5), allows us to efficiently decrease the I/O bottleneck by using efficient communication and data mapping strategies. For steering, we present an interface that allows not only simple parameter changes but also complete re-meshing of grids or operations involving regeneration of field values over the entire computational domain to be carried out. This approach, tested and validated on two industrial test cases, is generic enough so that no particular knowledge of the underlying model is required.
