VizWorld.com

VisIt 2.3 is now available, boasting new cumulative queries in selections, and new file readers for VelodyneCLE AMR, Nek5000, and some Cale formats.  Support for Xdmf has improved, and they’ve got some exciting new features for parallel users:

• VisIt’s X launching and parallel GPU acceleration features have been rewritten to mesh better with modern cluster installations. See the wiki for more information.
• VisIt can now start a remote compute engine through a gateway machine. This capability has been implemented by using ssh to login to the gateway machine and then using ssh to login to the remote machine from there. It can handle giving a password to the gateway machine, but not the remote machine. To enable launching a remote compute engine in this manner, enable the Use gateway toggle button and enter the name of the gateway machine in the text field next to it on the Host settings tab on the Host profiles window.

 

Looking forward to trying out the Gateway option, looks like it could solve lots of problems in my environment.

VisIt 2.3 Release Notes.

Science visit

In just a few weeks, the CINECA supercomputing centre in Bologna, Italy will be hosting a Workshop on Visualization of Large Scientific Data.

The scientific community is presently witnessing an unprecedented growth in the quality and quantity of data coming from simulations and real-world experiments. Moreover 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 (often sizes are measured in hundreds or even millions of Gigabytes) appropriate tools and techniques are needed. In-situ visualization libraries enable the user to connect directly to a running simulation, examine the data, do numerical queries and create graphical output while the simulation executes. It addresses the need of extreme scale simulation, eschewing the need to write data to disk. The workshop will bring together researchers, developers, computational scientists for cross-training and to discuss recent developments and future advancements in remote and in-situ visualization

I see that staff from Kitware (VTK, ParaView) will be there, and it seems they’ll be talking a lot about VisIt as well.  Both fabulous tools, but I find it interesting that CEI/Ensight isn’t mentioned anywhere…

via Workshop on Visualization of Large Scientific Data | Cineca.

Science cineca, conference, paraview, visit, workshop

This month’s issue of the IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications journal is dedicated to “Ultrascale Visualization”, all about visualizing massive datasets across some of the largest computers in the world.  In particular, this issue contains the article about the massive “Trillion Zone” run of VisIt we discussed a while back.

A series of experiments studied how visualization software scales to massive data sets. Although several paradigms exist for processing large data, the experiments focused on pure parallelism, the dominant approach for production software. The experiments used multiple visualization algorithms and ran on multiple architectures. They focused on massive-scale processing (16,000 or more cores and one trillion or more cells) and weak scaling. These experiments employed the largest data set sizes published to date in the visualization literature. The findings on scaling characteristics and bottlenecks will help researchers understand how pure parallelism performs at high levels of concurrency with very large data sets.

The paper is available from the IEEE Computer Society for $19, but I was lucky enough to get a review copy.  Read on to see some details and my thoughts.

Read more…

Science extreme, feature, hpc, visit

While I have never been to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, I have been a fan of their VisIt visualization tool.

Empisys generated this movie using Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) simulation data published by the University Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. This weather model simulates a large hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. The visualization was generated using Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) VisIt running on a Windows 2008 HPC Server R2 cluster with 64 processors.

via YouTube – Hurricane Simulation.wmv.

Science scientific visualization, visit

After we reported on the inclusion of VisIt into the SuperComputing 2009 Student Cluster Competition, Hank Childs stopped by to post some information.

As far as the benchmarks: the evaluation criteria is still being determined. From an HPC perspective, we obviously want to stress I/O, compute, and communication.

My initial thoughts were to upsample a toy data set to become a large one, then have them run a script to make a movie. I was thinking a three frame movie with volume rendering, contouring, and a moving slice.

He follows it up with an invitation for suggestions and ideas on what to include in the contest criteria. So, here’s your chance: What would make for a good VisIt benchmark?

Science benchmark, contest, feature, sc09, visit

The rules have been set for this year’s SuperComputing Student Cluster competition, and this year it’s all about “Go Green”.

This year’s SC09 Student Cluster Competition is built around a “Go Green!” theme, tying it in with this year’s show. Just like the previous competition, this year’s rules have capped the overall power requirements of each team’s gear to a pair of 120-volt, 20-amp circuits. Each circuit will have a soft limit of 13 amps. Penalties will be assessed if a respective team trips an alarm on the metered power circuits. Each team’s hardware, along with the metered power units, must fit into a single rack.

The teams & vendors have been set and work is underway.  The benchmarks consist of the usual simulation codes, but a great addition this year is VisIt.  I don’t see any details yet on what they’ll need to do inside of VisIt, but the fact that is made it into the application run category is a huge win for both the developers of VisIt and visualization scientists everywhere.

via SC09 Student Cluster Competition: Go Green! | insideHPC.com.

Science conference, contest, sc09, visit

On Monday afternoon I attended the VisIt Tutorial, taught by the ever-knowledgeable Sean Ahern and Hank Childs. The tutorial covered all the major parts you could hope for: Basic usage, advanced functionality, expressions, client-server, analysis, and finally development.  I thought I’ld cover some of the highlights for you in case you couldn’t make it yourself.

Read the review after the break.

Read more…

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VisWeek is the annual Visualization conference where researchers, users and enthusiasts of data visualization meet to present their work and discuss new ideas. This year the conference will be in Atlantic City, NJ from October 11th-16th and promises to be a very exciting event.

In this post, I focus more on a preview from the ‘Vis‘ side of things for VisWeek. I have previously posted previews for the InfoVis conference and for the VAST conference.

There are so many events that instead of listing all of them, I have categorized them by day. It includes Workshops, Panels, Tutorials and Paper talks.

Read Alark’s recommended events after the break.

Read more…

Graphics, Hardware conference, data exploration, data visualization, feature, graphics hardware, ieee, scientific visualization, vidsec, visit, visweek

The guys at SuperComputing have published a list of the tutorials that will be underway on November 15th and 16th, and there’s a few Visualization tutorials you may want to check out if you’re in the Portland, OR area.

• Nov15 8:30am – noon : (S09) VisIt – Visualization & Analysis for Very Large Data Sets
• Nov15 1:30pm – 5pm : (S12) Large Scale Visualization with ParaView
• Nov15 8:30am – 5pm : (S04) High Performance Computing with CUDA
• Nov16 1:30pm – 5pm: (M13) OpenCL: A Standard Platform for Programming Heterogeneous Parallel Computers

There’s also the usual MPI, Debugging, parallel computing, and high-performance tutorials as well. Hit their website for the full list.

SC Your Way – At the Conference.

Hardware, Science conference, cuda, opencl, paraview, sc09, tutorial, visit

Details of the massive VisIt run announced a while back, are starting to come out, and while they still aren’t publishing any concrete details, you can find some interesting details about the systems and testing procedures used:

The VACET team ran the experiments in April and May on six world-class supercomputers (latest TOP500 rankings noted):

• Franklin — a 38,128-core Cray XT4 located at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab (No. 11)
• JaguarPF — a 149,504-core Cray XT5 at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at ORNL (No. 2)
• Ranger — a 62,976-core x86_64 Linux system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin (No. 8 )
• Purple — a 12,288-core IBM Power5 at LLNL (No. 50)
• Juno — an 18,432-core x86_64 Linux system at LLNL (No. 19)
• Dawn — a 147,456-core BlueGene/P system at LLNL (No. 9)

One thing I quickly noticed from this list: Nothing from SGI.  (I would say Nothing from SUN as well, but I think the Ranger system is SUN).  But, aside from “because we can”, why did they do this? First is the following claim from Wes Bethel:

“The results show that visualization research and development efforts have produced technology that is today capable of ingesting and processing tomorrow’s datasets,” said Berkeley Lab’s E. Wes Bethel, who is co-leader of VACET. “These results are the largest-ever problem sizes and the largest degree of concurrency ever attempted within the DOE visualization research community.”

But more to the point is this:

Another purpose of these runs was to prepare for establishing VisIt’s credentials as a “Joule code,” or a code that has demonstrated scalability at a large number of cores. DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) is establishing a set of such codes to serve as a metric for tracking code performance and scalability as supercomputers are built with tens and hundreds of thousands of processor cores. VisIt is the first and only visual data analysis code that is part of the ASCR Joule metric.

via Smashing the Trillion Zone Barrier.

PS: The comment about “nothing from SGI” is meant as a bash against SGI, as in the DoE knows better than to run any SGI’s, not a bash against the credibility of the test.

Science doe, hpc, simulation, vacet, visit, visualization