Petascale Cloud Supercomputing for Terapixel Visualization of a Digital Twin

Abstract

Background-Photo-realistic terapixel visualization is computationally intensive and to date there have been no such visualizations of urban digital twins, the few terapixel visualizations that exist have looked towards space rather than earth. Objective-our aims are: creating a scalable cloud supercomputer software architecture for visualization; a photo-realistic terapixel 3D visualization of urban IoT data supporting daily updates; a rigorous evaluation of cloud supercomputing for our application. Method-We migrated the Blender Cycles path tracer to the public cloud within a new software framework designed to scale to petaFLOP performance. Results-we demonstrate we can compute a terapixel visualization in under one hour, the system scaling at 98% efficiency to use 1024 public cloud GPU nodes delivering 14 petaFLOPS. The resulting terapixel image supports interactive browsing of the city and its data at a wide range of sensing scales. Conclusion-The GPU compute resource available in the cloud is greater than anything available on our national supercomputers providing access to globally competitive resources. The direct financial cost of access, compared to procuring and running these systems, was low. The indirect cost, in overcoming teething issues with cloud software development, should reduce significantly over time.

Entropy Ordered Shapes as Bivariate Glyphs

“…In our previous research, we have implemented a number of glyph designs for representing urban environmental data in 3D city models [21,22]. We currently use the glyph design in Fig.…”

“…Our initial motivation for this work was solving a problem in an applied science project where the representation of urban sensor data from a network of Internet-Of-Things (IoT) sensors across Newcastle-upon-Tyne was a key goal, [22]. A small subset of these data are shown in Fig.…”

Agile Modeling and Simulation Technology of Heterogeneous Systems Based on Meta-model Modeling Method

“…MOF has made great contributions to the core principles of OMG model-driven architecture. On the basis of modeling established by UML [7], MOF introduces the concepts of formal meta-model and platform-independent model (PIM) of metadata (including several standard OMG meta-models including UML and MOF itself).…”