EAVL: The Extreme-scale Analysis and Visualization Library

Abstract

Analysis and visualization of the data generated by scientific simulation codes is a key step in enabling science from computation. However, a number of challenges lie along the current hardware and software paths to scientific discovery. First, only advanced parallelism techniques can take full advantage of the unprecedented scale of coming machines. In addition, as computational improvements outpace those of I/O, more data will be discarded and I/O-heavy analysis will suffer. Furthermore, the limited memory environment, particularly in the context of in situ analysis which can sidestep some I/O limitations, will require efficiency of both algorithms and infrastructure. Finally, advanced simulation codes with complex data models require commensurate data models in analysis tools. However, community visualization and analysis tools designed for parallelism and large data fall short in a number of these areas. In this paper, we describe EAVL, a new library with infrastructure and algorithms designed to address these critical needs for current and future generations of scientific software and hardware. We show results from EAVL demonstrating the strengths of its robust data model, advanced parallelism, and efficiency.