Nov. 14, 2012

Hank Childs, Lawrence Berkeley

Jeremy Meredith, Oak Ridge

Pat McCormick, Los Alamos

Chris Sewell, Los Alamos

Ken Moreland, Sandia

Panel at IEEE/ACM SuperComputing 2012

Visualization Frameworks for Multi-Core and Many-core

Architectures

Panel Motivation

A terrible mismatch between what we have and what we will need!

No threading, C++,

parallelism through MPI (but one MPI task

per core)

State of most visualization software

today

Seamless support for multi-core and many-

core nodesVS

Upcoming requirements stemming from HPC

trends

Millions of lines of code, hundreds to thousands person

years of investment.

Multiple new efforts recently started.

This panel’s purpose is to inform about these efforts: their

goals and strategies.

Future Requirements Opinions vary on

requirements. However… Must run on future

architectures. Must be capable of in

situ processing. Must be capable of

supporting massive data sets (scale and complexity).

Fortunately, lessons learned from previous era: Interoperability, data flow networks, data

models, execution models

To date, our community has used a combination of

libraries and tools. Libraries:

Provide data model, execution model and algorithms

Examples: AVS, OpenDX, VTK, more…

Tools: Incorporate libraries (for data model,

execution model, and algorithms) Provide user interface, parallel handling Examples: EnSight, FieldView, ParaView,

VisIt, VAPOR, more…

This software is not vaporware

Tutorial and code sprint, Kitware HQ, Clifton Park, NY,

September 2012

Hedgehogs of gradient fields along an isosurface in PISTON. Implemented by Childs (LBNL) and Sewell (LANL).

Prototype integration of VisIt and DAX, with DAX calculating derived quantities. Implemented by Harrison (LLNL).

Transform operator (UI + functionality) in EAVL/EAVLab. Implemented by Whitlock (LLNL).

Panel Format

Overview (8 minutes) Hank Childs, Lawrence Berkeley

EAVL (16 minutes) Jeremy Meredith, Oak Ridge

DSLs (16 minutes) Pat McCormick, Los Alamos

PISTON (16 minutes) Chris Sewell, Los Alamos

DAX (16 minutes) Ken Moreland, Sandia

Question & Answer (18 minutes)

Questions for the panelists

What fundamental problem are you trying to solve?

What are your plans to deal with exascale-specific issues (massive concurrency, distributed memory, memory overhead, fault tolerance)?

What is your philosophy for dealing with ambiguity of the exascale architecture?

How is your technology implemented? What is the long-term result for this

effort? (Production software? Research prototype?)