Title
Visio: Enabling Interactive Visualization Of Ultra-Scale, Time Series Data Via High-Bandwidth Distributed I/O Systems
Keywords
Data Intensive Scientific Computing; Distributed Computing; I/O; Parallel Computing; Scientific Visualization
Abstract
Petascale simulations compute at resolutions ranging into billions of cells and write terabytes of data for visualization and analysis. Interactive visualization of this time series is a desired step before starting a new run. The I/O subsystem and associated network often are a significant impediment to interactive visualization of time-varying data, as they are not configured or provisioned to provide necessary I/O read rates. In this paper, we propose a new I/O library for visualization applications: VisIO. Visualization applications commonly use N-to-N reads within their parallel enabled readers which provides an incentive for a shared-nothing approach to I/O, similar to other data-intensive approaches such as Hadoop. However, unlike other data-intensive applications, visualization requires: (1) interactive performance for large data volumes, (2) compatibility with MPI and POSIX file system semantics for compatibility with existing infrastructure, and (3) use of existing file formats and their stipulated data partitioning rules. VisIO, provides a mechanism for using a non-POSIX distributed file system to provide linear scaling of I/O bandwidth. In addition, we introduce a novel scheduling algorithm that helps to co-locate visualization processes on nodes with the requested data. Testing using VisIO integrated into Para View was conducted using the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) on TACC's Longhorn cluster. A representative dataset, VPIC, across 128 nodes showed a 64.4% read performance improvement compared to the provided Lustre installation. Also tested, was a dataset representing a global ocean salinity simulation that showed a 51.4% improvement in read performance over Lustre when using our VisIO system. VisIO, provides powerful high-performance I/O services to visualization applications, allowing for interactive performance with ultra-scale, time-series data. © 2011 IEEE.
Publication Date
10-3-2011
Publication Title
Proceedings - 25th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2011
Number of Pages
68-79
Document Type
Article; Proceedings Paper
Personal Identifier
scopus
DOI Link
https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS.2011.17
Copyright Status
Unknown
Socpus ID
80053269211 (Scopus)
Source API URL
https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/80053269211
STARS Citation
Mitchell, Christopher; Ahrens, James; and Wang, Jun, "Visio: Enabling Interactive Visualization Of Ultra-Scale, Time Series Data Via High-Bandwidth Distributed I/O Systems" (2011). Scopus Export 2010-2014. 2958.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/scopus2010/2958