Scalable End-to-End Parallel Supercomputing and Application to Real-time Earthquake Modeling (original) (raw)

We demonstrate a new scalable approach to real-time monitoring, visualization, and steering of massively parallel simulations from a personal computer. The basis is an endto-end approach to parallel supercomputing in which all components -meshing, partitioning, solver, and visualization -are tightly coupled and execute in parallel on a supercomputer. This approach avoids bottlenecks associated with transfer and storage of massive simulation outputs, thereby enabling real-time visualization and steering on supercomputers with thousands of processors. We have incorporated this methodology into a framework named Hercules, which targets octree-based finite element simulations. The submitted video demonstrates real-time monitoring and steering from a laptop PC of a 1024-processor simulation of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Southern California. Because this end-to-end approach does not require moving large data over the network and is completely scalable, our approach shows promise for overcoming the challenges of visualization of petascale simulations.