As the HPC community starts focusing its efforts towards exascale, it becomes clear that we are looking at machines with a billion way concurrency. Although parallel computing has been at the core of the performance gains achieved until now, scaling over 1,000 times the current concurrency can be challenging. As discussed in this paper, even the smallest memory access and synchronization overheads can cause major bottlenecks at this scale. As we develop new software and adapt existing algorithms for exascale, we need to be cognizant of such pitfalls. In this paper, we document our experience with optimizing a fairly common and parallelizable visualization algorithm, threshold of cells based on scalar values, for such highly concurrent architectures. Our experiments help us identify design patterns that can be generalized for other visualization algorithms as well. We discuss our implementation within the Dax toolkit, which is a framework for data analysis and visualization at extreme scale. The Dax toolkit employs the patterns discussed here within the framework’s scaffolding to make it easier for algorithm developers to write algorithms without having to worry about such scaling issues.
ParaView is a popular open-source general-purpose scientific visualization application. One of the many visualization tools
available within ParaView is the volume rendering of unstructured meshes. Volume rendering is a technique that renders
a mesh as a translucent solid, thereby allowing the user to see every point in three-dimensional space simultaneously.
Because volume rendering is computationally intensive, ParaView now employs a unique parallel rendering algorithm to
speed the processes. The parallel rendering algorithm is very flexible. It works equally well for both volumes and surfaces,
and can properly render the intersection of a volume and opaque polygonal surfaces. The parallel rendering algorithm
can also render images for tiled displays. In this paper, we explore the implementation of parallel unstructured volume
rendering in ParaView.
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