VTK-m Scaling on Frontier
- Science Problem
- Frontier, the world’s first exascale machine, achieves its scale with next-generation processors and unprecedented parallelism.
- The bandwidth of computation on modern supercomputers like Frontier exceeds the bandwidth of storage, making complete captures of simulation data impossible.
- Technical Solution
- VTK-m, a visualization library designed for modern accelerators, was enhanced with multi-node communication to scale rendering to the entirety of Frontier.
VTK-m rendering of 79.5 trillion cell synthetic data set using 74,088 GPUs on Frontier. This image was rendered in 0.3 seconds.
- The combined rendering algorithm was applied to a synthetic data set that was generated, processed, and rendered on the majority of Frontier.
- Science Impact
- VTK-m is instrumental in providing in situ visualization capability to multiple ECP simulation codes, both directly and via ECP ALPINE’s ParaView, VisIt, and Ascent tools.
- This demonstrated functionality is an important feature of in situ processing, and this low time overhead minimizes the overall impact on the simulation performance.