A Steering Environment for Online Parallel Visualization of Legacy Parallel Simulations

Abstract

In the context of scientific computing, the computational steering consists in the coupling of numerical simulations with 3D visualization systems through the network. This allows scientists to monitor online the intermediate results of their computations in a more interactive way than the batch mode, and allows them to modify the simulation parameters on-the-fly. While most of existing computational steering environments support parallel simulations, they are often limited to sequential visualization systems. This may lead to an important bottleneck and increased rendering time. To achieve the required performance for online visualization, we have designed the EPSN framework, a computational steering environment that enables to interconnect legacy parallel simulations with parallel visualization systems. For this, we have introduced a redistribution algorithm for unstructured data, that is well adapted to the context of M × N computational steering. Then, we focus on the design of our parallel viewer and present some experimental results obtained with a particlebased simulation in astrophysics.

Damaris: How to Efficiently Leverage Multicore Parallelism to Achieve Scalable, Jitter-free I/O

“…This design principle is directly inspired by ADIOS [18] and also present in many other tools such as EPSN [13]. The goals of this external configuration are 1) to keep a high-level description of the datasets within the server, allowing higherlevel data manipulations, 2) to avoid static layout descriptions to be sent by clients through the shared memory (only data is sent together with the minimal descriptor that lets the server retrieve the full description in its metadata system).…”

In-Situ Visualization in Computational Fluid Dynamics Using Open-Source tools: Integration of Catalyst into Code_Saturne

“…EPSN which is a general coupling system, allows for the connection of M simulation nodes to N visualization nodes through a network [7]. This solution is a loosely coupled approach, requiring separate resources and data transfer through the network.…”

Damaris/Viz: A nonintrusive, adaptable and user-friendly in situ visualization framework

“…GLEAN is also used in conjunction with ADIOS [22]. EPSN [7] is an environment providing steering and visualization capabilities to existing parallel simulations. Simulations instrumented with EPSN ship their data to a visualization pipeline running on a remote cluster, thus EPSN is an hybrid approach including both code changes and the use of additional remote resources.…”

“…• Configuration file: Damaris uses an XML configuration in a way similar to ADIOS [19] and EPSN [7]. The use of such a configuration file alleviates code modification by externally providing the information required by visualization tools.…”