Approaching the exa-scale: a real-world evaluation of rendering extremely large data sets

Journal Article · Fri Oct 15 04:00:00 EDT 2010

OSTI ID:1038879

Patchett, John M ^[1]; Ahrens, James P ^[1]; Lo, Li - Ta ^[1]; Browniee, Carson S ^[1]; Mitchell, Christopher J ^[1]; Hansen, Chuck ^[2]

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1. Los Alamos National Laboratory
2. UNIV OF UTAH

Extremely large scale analysis is becoming increasingly important as supercomputers and their simulations move from petascale to exascale. The lack of dedicated hardware acceleration for rendering on today's supercomputing platforms motivates our detailed evaluation of the possibility of interactive rendering on the supercomputer. In order to facilitate our understanding of rendering on the supercomputing platform, we focus on scalability of rendering algorithms and architecture envisioned for exascale datasets. To understand tradeoffs for dealing with extremely large datasets, we compare three different rendering algorithms for large polygonal data: software based ray tracing, software based rasterization and hardware accelerated rasterization. We present a case study of strong and weak scaling of rendering extremely large data on both GPU and CPU based parallel supercomputers using Para View, a parallel visualization tool. Wc use three different data sets: two synthetic and one from a scientific application. At an extreme scale, algorithmic rendering choices make a difference and should be considered while approaching exascale computing, visualization, and analysis. We find software based ray-tracing offers a viable approach for scalable rendering of the projected future massive data sizes.

• Research Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)
• Sponsoring Organization: DOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC52-06NA25396
• OSTI ID: 1038879
• Report Number(s): LA-UR-10-07016; LA-UR-10-7016
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
ALGORITHMS
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
EVALUATION
SUPERCOMPUTERS