Particle tracking in open simulation laboratories

Abstract

Particle tracking along streamlines and pathlines is a common scientific analysis technique, which has demanding data, computation and communication requirements. It has been studied in the context of high-performance computing due to the difficulty in its efficient parallelization and its high demands on communication and computational load. In this paper, we study efficient evaluation methods for particle tracking in open simulation laboratories. Simulation laboratories have a fundamentally different architecture from today's supercomputers and provide publicly-available analysis functionality. We focus on the I/O demands of particle tracking for numerical simulation datasets 100s of TBs in size. We compare data-parallel and task-parallel approaches for the advection of particles and show scalability results on data-intensive workloads from a live production environment. We have developed particle tracking capabilities for the Johns Hopkins Turbulence Databases, which store computational fluid dynamics simulation data, including forced isotropic turbulence, magnetohydrodynamics, channel flow turbulence and homogeneous buoyancy-driven turbulence.