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Video – Discussion Between SDSC and Argonne About the Challenges of Visualizing Large Data Sets

December 23rd, 2011

In the two previous posts we presented the simulation of the spatial structure of the light emitted in early galaxies. We asked Rick Wagner of SDSC to discuss with Venkartram Vishwanath of Argonne the challenges of creating visualizations of very large numerical scale.

The simulation of Rick produces for example 256 GB of data for a small set of the field and up to many TB of data for the entire one. Traditionally they write the snapshots to disk and analyze them later. According to Rick this approach is not sustainable in the future since larger and larger sets of data will be produced.

Venkartram agrees that one challenge of next generation simulations is that I/O will not keep up with the growth rate of computing capability. In his group at Argonne they are now working on efficient infrastructure and software to reduce the amount of data being written to storage to perform analysis, as well as in-situ visualization while the simulation is progress. This will facilitate the transformation of the data into insight.

Venkartram is developing methods that will allow a non-intrusive integration of the simulation with the visualization. Not a single line of the code has to be modified. The data is buffered, staged and written out, maintaining the integrity of the data formats that are produced. This method can also be used to increase the speed data is written to disk.

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Interview with Joe Insley of Argonne on Visualizing the Spatial Structure of the Light Emitted in Early Galaxies

December 22nd, 2011

Joe Insley (Argonne National Lab) has been working together with Rick Wagner of SDSC (see previous interview) on the visualization of the spatial structure of the light emitted in early galaxies. The visualization compares variables from two different simulations.

To compare of the two different simulations visually, Joe used vl3, a hardware-accelerated volume rendering library and application developed at the University of Chicago and Argonne.

The visualization for smaller data sets can be rendered in real time on a half-dozen nodes with 20 frames per second. The visualization can also be streamed from Argonne to SDSC over a dedicated network using a software developed at Argonne, and is controlled through a web-based client

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Interview with Rick Wagner SDSC – Simulation of the Formation of the First Galaxies

December 21st, 2011

At the San Diego Supercomputing Centre (SDSC) booth at SC11 we met Rick Wagner who presented simulations of astrophysics that were done on Jaguar and Kraken at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In the simulation one could see the light of early galaxies that are forming (red shift of 8). The researchers simulated the birth of the first generation of stars in a galaxy and how their light starts to heat the gas around them, raising pressure and lowering density. This allows us to understand the impact on other stars formation and on the matter distribution of the universe. This is the first time that the results of such a simulation can be compare favorably with observations. The size of the simulation is 3200 grid cells on a side, cosmologically it has a volume of about 80 megaparsec.

“The light from early galaxies had a dramatic impact on the gasses filling the universe. This video highlights the spatial structure of the light’s effect, by comparing two simulations: one with a self-consistent radiation field (RHD), and one without (HD). The comparison shown is the relative difference of the temperature. The colors show whether the temperature is greater in radiative or non-radiative case.”

This research work is the result of a collaboration between SDSC for the scientific part and Argonne National Laboratory for the visualization. In two additional posts, we will focus on the visualizations aspects of this project. First we will share an interview with Joe Insley of Argonne, and afterwards  a video with Rick Wagner discussing with Venkartram Vishwanath of Argonne the challenges of displaying very large amounts of data.

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Submissions for ISC Research Papers, Tutorials Now Being Accepted

December 20th, 2011

The 2012 International Supercomputing Conference Research Paper and Tutorial Committees are now accepting full papers and tutorial proposals for ISC´12 in Europe. The ISC´12 Call for Papers is supported by the IEEE Germany Section.

The deadline for research paper and tutorial submissions is Sunday, January, 22, 2012. Please refer to the ISC´12 website for full submission guidelines or contact info.scientificsession@isc-events.com and info.tutorial@isc-events.com.

The ISC´12 conference and exhibition, the 27th in the ISC series, will take place June 17 – 21, 2012, and is expected to draw more than 2,400 academic and industry attendees and 160 exhibitors representing high-performance computing, networking and storage to Hamburg, Germany.

High-quality research papers reporting original work in theoretical, experimental and industry research and development are sought in the following areas:

  • Architectures (multicore/manycore systems, heterogeneous systems, network technology and programming models)
  • Algorithms and Analysis (scalability on future architectures, performance evaluation and tuning)
  • Large-Scale Simulations (coupled simulations, industrial simulations and data visualization)
  • Future Trends (Exascale HPC, HPC in the Cloud)
  • Storage and Data (file systems and tape libraries, data intensive applications and databases)
  • Software Engineering in HPC (application of methods, surveys)
  • Supercomputing Facility (batch job management, job mix and system utilization and monitoring and administration tools)
  • A totally new topic next year will be the Scalable Applications: 50k+ (ISC Research thrust). The Research Paper committee encourages scientists to submit results which demonstrate scaling of an application to more than 50,000 cores.

ISC Awards Program

Two awards will be given to the most outstanding papers. The German Gauss Center for Supercomputing sponsors the Gauss Award, which will be assigned to the most outstanding paper in the field of scalable supercomputing.

The second award is the PRACE (the Partnership for Advanced Computing) Award which will be awarded to the best scientific paper by a European student or scientist in the following areas – a breakthrough in science achieved with high performance computing resources, algorithms or implementations that achieve significant improvements in scalability and novel approaches to performance evaluation on massively parallel architectures.

The ISC´12 Tutorials are intended as educational events that cover all areas as listed on the Call for Research Papers. However, ISC encourage tutorials of broad applicability rather than those focusing solely on the research in a limited domain or a particular group.

Presenters are encouraged to incorporate hands-on sessions where it is appropriate and provide the attendees with a comprehensive introduction to the topic before moving on to cover specific approaches in more depth.

Other Submission Deadlines

Call for Student Volunteers: Monday, April 2, 2012

Call for Posters: Monday, April 9, 2012

Call for BoFs: Monday, April 9, 2012

Questions about the technical program should be directed to the Conference Program Coordinator, Ms. Heike Walther, at heike.walther@isc-events.com.

After the great success of last year, hpc-ch will again participate at the ISC conference and exhibit with a community booth.

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Article on Flash Informatique at EPFL about Free Software for HPC

December 19th, 2011

In the last number of “Flash Informatique” at EPFL you can read an article by Vittoria Rezzonico about free software for HPC.

Since the Beowulf revolution, High Performance Computing (HPC) has been taken over not only by clusters built from commodity hardware, but also by free software. Starting from the operating system, up to the specific scientific software, supercomputers (even the most powerful in the world) sport all kind of free software.

Operating systems in the Top500

Operating systems in the Top500

Read the article (in French) »

You may also be interested in reading an interview with George Lake, who was working in the research group that created the first beowulf cluster.

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