In-Situ High Performance Visualization for Astronomy & Cosmology

TL;DR

This paper presents an in-situ visualization framework for astronomy and cosmology that enables real-time analysis of large-scale simulation data, reducing storage bottlenecks and improving data accessibility.

Contribution

It introduces Hecuba, a distributed database framework for streaming simulation data, integrated with Changa and visualization tools like ParaView and VisIVO for in-situ analysis.

Findings

Successful integration of Hecuba with Changa for real-time data streaming.

Effective in-situ visualization of N-body simulation results.

Reduction of data storage and post-processing needs.

Abstract

The Astronomy & Cosmology (A&C) community is presently witnessing an unprecedented growth in the quality and quantity of data coming from simulations and observations. Writing results of numerical simulations to disk files has long been a bottleneck in high-performance computing. To access effectively and extract the scientific content of such large-scale data sets appropriate tools and techniques are needed. This is especially true for visualization tools, where petascale data size problems cannot be visualized without some data filtering, which reduces either the resolution or the amount of data volume managed by the visualization tool. A solution to this problem is to run the analysis and visualization concurrently (in-situ) with the simulation and bypass the storage of the full results. In particular we use Hecuba, a framework offering a highly distributed database to stream A\&C simulation data for on-line visualization. We will demonstrate the Hecuba platform integration with the Changa high performant cosmological simulator and the in-situ visualization of its N-body results with the ParaView and VisIVO tools.