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Evaluation of a Scalable In-Situ Visualization System Approach in a Parallelized Computational Fluid Dynamics Application

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Virtual Realities

Abstract

Current parallel supercomputers provide sufficient performance to simulate unsteady three-dimensional fluid dynamics in high resolution. However, the visualization of the huge amounts of result data cannot be handled by traditional methods, where post-processing modules are usually coupled to the raw data source, either by files or by data flow. To avoid significant bottlenecks of the storage and communication resources, efficient techniques for data extraction and preprocessing at the source have been realized in the parallel, network-distributed chain of our Distributed Simulation and Virtual Reality Environment(DSVR). Here the 3D data extraction is implemented as a parallel library (libDVRP) and can be done in-situ during the numerical simulations, which avoids the storage of raw data for visualization at all.

In this work we evaluate our current techniques of flow visualization via parallel generation of pathlines and volume visualization via parallel extraction of isosurfaces in a realistic scenario. The Parallelized Large-eddy Simulation Model(PALM) serves here as a typical example application of numerical simulation of unsteady flows. Our special attention we payed to the evaluation of the influence of the additional in-situ visualization on the parallel speed-up of PALM. Finally it can be shown that this influence is neglectable small for parallel runs with up to over 80 cores.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Developed by Institute of Meteorology and Climatology, Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to PD Dr. Siegfried Raasch and his group for sharing the PALM software and for fruitful discussions.

Computational support and infrastructure was provided by the Center of Information and Media Technology (ZIM) at the Heinrich Heine University of Duesseldorf (Germany).

This work is partly supported by the DFG (German Research Foundation) under Grant No. OL 241/1-1 (Project EVITA).

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Correspondence to Stephan Olbrich .

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Manten, S., Vetter, M., Olbrich, S. (2011). Evaluation of a Scalable In-Situ Visualization System Approach in a Parallelized Computational Fluid Dynamics Application. In: Brunnett, G., Coquillart, S., Welch, G. (eds) Virtual Realities. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-99178-7_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-99178-7_12

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