Parallel visualization and analysis with paraview on a Cray XT4
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- ORNL
Scientific data sets produced by modern supercomputers like ORNL's Cray XT 4, Jaguar, can be extremely large, making visualization and analysis more difficult as moving large resultant data to dedicated analysis systems can be prohibitively expensive. We share our continuing work of integrating a parallel visualization system, ParaView, on ORNL's Jaguar system and our efforts to enable extreme scale interactive data visualization and analysis. We will discuss porting challenges and present performance numbers. Jaguar is a Cray XT4 with 7,832 compute nodes each with 4 cores and 8GB of memory, located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Jaguar is currently ranked No.8 in the Top 500. Jaguar, and other machines like it, enable increasingly larger data sets. Whether scientists are producing extremely massive data or small data they still have a requirement for analysis. Analysis is often difficult for larger data and it is further complicated when the user is distant to the data. Data sets that are too large to ship and/or analyze on a single desktop require a parallel analysis tool and a high performance computer to run on. Running ParaView interactively on Jaguar is a positive improvement for both local and remote users. We have shown that it is feasible for our user at LANL to visualize his simulation data created on jaguar. Local users may face fewer obstacles and get improved performance, due to their higher bandwidth to Jaguar. For future work, we would like to see higher priority queues that enable interactive visualization. A more interactive user-friendly qsub that estimates time to allocation would be very useful. Hopefully, our work will lead to more users attempting interactive visualization on Jaguar, resulting in quicker turnaround times for visualization and analysis. As users migrate to using supercomputing platforms for visualization, we expect future research possibilities in this area.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC52-06NA25396
- OSTI ID:
- 1019552
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-10-02238; LA-UR-10-2238; TRN: US201115%%213
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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