Towards Online Visualization and Interactive Monitoring of Real-Time CFD Simulations on Commodity Hardware

Abstract

Real-time rendering in the realm of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in particular and scientific high performance computing (HPC) in general is a comparably young field of research, as the complexity of most problems with practical relevance is too high for a real-time numerical simulation. However, recent advances in HPC and the development of very efficient numerical techniques allow running first optimized numerical simulations in or near real-time, which in return requires integrated and optimized visualization techniques that do not affect performance. In this contribution, we present concepts, implementation details and several application examples of a minimally-invasive, efficient visualization tool for the interactive monitoring of 2D and 3D turbulent flow simulations on commodity hardware. The numerical simulations are conducted with ELBE, an efficient lattice Boltzmann environment based on NVIDIA CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), which provides optimized numerical kernels for 2D and 3D computational fluid dynamics with fluid-structure interactions and turbulence.

Using an Interactive Lattice Boltzmann Solver in Fluid Mechanics Instruction

“…The easy and direct control of these features is realized with a graphical user interface that can be started as a separate process and communicates with ELBEvis through a shared memory segment. The details of ELBEvis are elaborately discussed in [36]. The performance of the fully-coupled ELBE-ELBEvis solver yields still more than 90% of the performance of the standalone ELBE simulation for both 2D and 3D simulations (Tables 1 and 2 in [36]).…”

“…The details of ELBEvis are elaborately discussed in [36]. The performance of the fully-coupled ELBE-ELBEvis solver yields still more than 90% of the performance of the standalone ELBE simulation for both 2D and 3D simulations (Tables 1 and 2 in [36]). Only for two very compute-intensive visualizer features, the performance is significantly reduced, down to 76% for the isolines filter and down to 38% for the streamline filter (which requires a time-integration of a frozen velocity field).…”

“…For the teaching applications presented in this work, the ELBE solver is used in combination with the visualizer interface ELBEvis [36]. The primary objective of all added functionality for visualization and interaction purposes is to maintain the high update rates of the main computation.…”