An Approach to Exascale Visualization: Interactive Viewing of In-Situ Visualization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel interactive visualization method for exascale supercomputing, enabling analysis of massive in-situ visualization datasets through simultaneous visualization and interactive postprocessing.

Contribution

It proposes applying numerous in-situ visualizations concurrently and analyzing them interactively, significantly reducing data size and enabling efficient postprocessing.

Findings

Feasibility demonstrated with multiple simulation-produced movies.

Interactive analysis allows changing viewing angles and parameters.

Movie dataset size is manageable compared to raw data in exascale computing.

Abstract

In the coming era of exascale supercomputing, in-situ visualization will be a crucial approach for reducing the output data size. A problem of in-situ visualization is that it loses interactivity if a steering method is not adopted. In this paper, we propose a new method for the interactive analysis of in-situ visualization images produced by a batch simulation job. A key idea is to apply numerous (thousands to millions) in-situ visualizations simultaneously. The viewer then analyzes the image database interactively during postprocessing. If each movie can be compressed to 100 MB, one million movies will only require 100 TB, which is smaller than the size of the raw numerical data in exascale supercomputing. We performed a feasibility study using the proposed method. Multiple movie files were produced by a simulation and they were analyzed using a specially designed movie player. The user could change the viewing angle, the visualization method, and the parameters interactively by retrieving an appropriate sequence of images from the movie dataset.