APPLICATIONS

Sandia National Labs, Kitware, and NVIDIA today announced a major advance in large-datascientific visualization and rendering for simulations being run on Sandia'snew supercomputer, Red Storm. Sandia's Red RoSE visualization cluster is beingused to render this data, allowing scientists to analyze real world problemswith extraordinary precision and fidelity in fields such as national defenseand security, aerospace, and environmental research. These results were achieved with ParaView, an opensource visualization application, running on Red RoSE, one of the world's mostpowerful visualization clusters. Developed by Kitware, ParaView enables parallel graphics processing across alarge number of NVIDIA Quadro cards in the Red RoSE visualization cluster.This achievement stems directly from sustained efforts to deliver scalablevisualization technologies through strategic investments and developments bythe National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Advanced Simulation andComputing (ASC) program and the ASC tri-labs, Sandia National Laboratories(SNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and Lawrence Livermore NationalLaboratory (LLNL). Visualization is an integral component of ASC and is essential tounderstanding the massive data produced in simulations being run in thenational labs. Such simulation results can be enormous (often terabytes insize) and can provide a unique challenge to the visualization systems taskedwith the processing of this data. The "Red RoSE" cluster, which is part of the infrastructure deployed atSandia in support of the Red Storm environment, includes 264 visualizationnodes (workstations), each comprised of the following: -- NVIDIA Quadro FX 3400 PCI Express graphics boards -- Workstations equipped with Dual 3.6 GHz Intel Xeon EM64T processors, and 4GB of RAM -- InfiniBand 4x HCA interconnect, allowing the data to be processed across the 264 nodes "The combination of ParaView and NVIDIA high-performance graphics hardwarehas greatly enhanced our scientific visualization abilities for large datasets. We're now able to load up, process, and visualize some of the world'slargest datasets at interactive rates," said Brian Wylie, visualization teamleader, Sandia National Labs. "NVIDIA Quadro commercial off-the-shelf solutions provide the graphicsprocessing power in visualization systems that have traditionally relied oncostly proprietary supercomputers," said Jeff Brown, general manager forNVIDIA professional products, "NVIDIA professional platforms allow ourcustomers like Sandia to deploy solutions that are highly scalable and takeadvantage of the very latest advances in GPU technologies." ParaView performs various operations on the data including calculatingderivative scalar fields, t-stripping, cutting, clipping, and glyphing atinteractive rates. The aggregate parallel rendering performance is deliveredvia a high performance image delivery system to the user's desktop. Fortypical simulation results, ParaView streams images from a cluster to adesktop at about 15 frames per second. This level of performance is enabled bythe latest generation of NVIDIA Quadro graphics hardware which provides fastPCI Express read-back rates. ParaView can deliver rendering performance ofover 8 billion polygons per second through Sandia's parallel rendering library (Ice-T) and Sandia's image compression system (SQUIRT). ParaView is built on top of the popular Visualization Toolkit (VTK) andleverages cutting-edge parallel rendering algorithms and leading technology incommodity PC clusters and graphics hardware to interactively visualize some ofthe world's largest datasets. Contributors and developers currently include:Kitware, LANL, SNL, and the Army Research Laboratory. ParaView is funded bythe US Department of Energy ASC program as part of a contract awarded toKitware, Inc. by a consortium of the three ASC National Labs -- LANL, SNL, andLLNL. The goal of the project is to develop scalable parallel processing toolswith an emphasis on distributed memory implementations. The project includesparallel algorithms, infrastructure, I/O, support, and display devices. Onesignificant feature of the contract is that all software developed is to bedelivered open source. Hence ParaView is available as an open-source system.