Improving Performance of M-to-N Processing and Data Redistribution in In Transit Analysis and Visualization

In an in transit setting, a parallel data producer, such as a numerical simulation, runs on one set of ranks M, while a data consumer, such as a parallel visualization application, runs on a different set of ranks N. One of the central challenges in this in transit setting is to determine the mapping of data from the set of M producer ranks to the set of N consumer ranks. This is a challenging problem for several reasons, such as the producer and consumer codes potentially having different scaling characteristics and different data models. The resulting mapping from M to N ranks can have a significant impact on aggregate application performance. In this work, we present an approach for performing this M-to-N mapping in a way that has broad applicability across a diversity of data producer and consumer applications. We evaluate its design and performance with a study that runs at high concurrency on a modern HPC platform. By leveraging design characteristics, which facilitate an “intelligent” mapping from M-to-N, we observe significant performance gains are possible in terms of several different metrics, including time-to-solution and amount of data moved

Interactive Isocontouring of High-Order Surfaces

Scientists and engineers are making increasingly use of hp-adaptive discretization methods to compute simulations. While techniques for isocontouring the high-order data generated by these methods have started to appear, they typically do not facilitate interactive data exploration. This work presents a novel interactive approach for approximate isocontouring of high-order data. The method is based on a two-phase hybrid rendering algorithm. In the first phase, coarsely seeded particles are guided by the gradient of the field for obtaining an initial sampling of the isosurface in object space. The second phase performs ray casting in the image space neighborhood of the initial samples. Since the neighborhood is small, the initial guesses tend to be close to the isosurface, leading to accelerated root finding and thus efficient rendering. The object space phase affects the density of the coarse samples on the isosurface, which can lead to holes in the final rendering and overdraw. Thus, we also propose a heuristic, based on dynamical systems theory, that adapts the neighborhood of the seeds in order to obtain a better coverage of the surface. Results for datasets from computational fluid dynamics are shown and performance measurements for our GPU implementation are given

Direct Multifield Volume Ray Casting of Fiber Surfaces

Multifield data are common in visualization. However, reducing these data to comprehensible geometry is a challenging problem. Fiber surfaces, an analogy of isosurfaces to bivariate volume data, are a promising new mechanism for understanding multifield volumes. In this work, we explore direct ray casting of fiber surfaces from volume data without any explicit geometry extraction. We sample directly along rays in domain space, and perform geometric tests in range space where fibers are defined, using a signed distance field derived from the control polygons. Our method requires little preprocess, and enables real-time exploration of data, dynamic modification and pixel-exact rendering of fiber surfaces, and support for higher-order interpolation in domain space. We demonstrate this approach on several bivariate datasets, including analysis of multi-field combustion data

09251 Abstracts Collection -- Scientific Visualization

From 06-14-2009 to 06-19-2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09251 ``Scientific Visualization \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, over 50 international participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general