Special Talk by Dave Yuen

Interactive Visualization and Monitoring of 3-D Mantle Convection


With the imminent arrival of petascale computing in the United States by 2010, new strategies for visualizing and monitoring high-resolution numerical simulations on massively parallel computers are sorely needed to overcome the extreme data and resource requirements coming out of the thousands of processors. We have employed a visualization system consisting of 14 powerful Dell workstations, each with a multi-terabyte disk, connected via a high-speed network with a bandwidth on the order of a few gigabits per second to a locally situated massively parallel system with approximately 2,000 processing elements. This system has been constructed at the Laboratory of Computational Sciences and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Near real-time interactive analysis of 3-D mantle convection using around 10 million grid points has been carried out using a client-server application capable of streaming gigabytes of simulated data to a remote Powerwall with 13 million pixels.

Concurrently, we have constructed a web-portal that allows a user to monitor the same run at home or in a hotel room, using a laptop. In our case, interactive computing takes on the meaning of performing such runs for a limited duration of time, say 1 to 2 hours. This calls for a balance between grid resolution and the number of processing elements required to provide the level of interactivity needed to achieve one to a few frames per second. Our mode of operation represents a new paradigm in numerical modeling that supports a trend toward both real-time visualization and monitoring of high-resolution models and a consequent reduction in storage of raw output data, since the interactive periods are by definition short. Using this interactive strategy periodically, we can facilitate long heroic runs extending over a few days on petascale systems.