In Situ Visualization With Temporal Caching

Abstract

In situ visualization is a technique in which plots and other visual analyses are performed in tandem with numerical simulation processes in order to better utilize HPC machine resources. Especially with unattended exploratory engineering simulation analyses, events may occur during the run, which justify supplemental processing. Sometimes though, when the events do occur, the phenomena of interest includes the physics that precipitated the events and this may be the key insight into understanding the phenomena that is being simulated. In situ temporal caching is the temporary storing of produced data in memory for possible later analysis including time varying visualization. The later analysis and visualization still occurs during the simulation run but not until after the significant events have been detected. In this article, we demonstrate how temporal caching can be used with in-line in situ visualization to reduce simulation run-time while still capturing essential simulation results.