NVIDIA IndeX accelerated computing for visualizing Cholla's galactic winds

Abstract

Galactic winds – outflows of gas driven out of galaxies by the combined effects of thousands of supernovae – are a crucial feature of galaxy evolution. Despite their importance, a complete theoretical picture of these winds has been elusive. Simulating the complicated interaction between the hot, high pressure gas created by supernovae and the cooler, high density gas in the galaxy disk requires massive computational resources and sophisticated software. For this purpose, Computational Hydrodynamics On Parallel Architectures (Cholla) has been demonstrated to be a scalable and efficient tool that operates in large, distributed multi-GPU environments at high levels of performance. This additional performance results in unprecedented resolution for this type of simulation and massive amounts of generated data. This raises the requirements for analysis tools that can cope with scale and complexity of the simulated physical processes. To address those challenges, we utilize NVIDIA IndeX as a scalable framework to visualize the simulation output: NVIDIA IndeX features a streaming-based architecture to interactively explore simulation results in large-scale, multi-GPU environments. We utilize customized sampling programs for multi-volume and surface rendering to address analysis questions of galactic wind simulations. This combination of massively parallel simulation and analysis allows us to utilize recent supercomputer capabilities and to speed up the exploration of galactic wind simulations.