October 2006
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Sandia Achieves Turnkey Distance Visualization of Large Data ParaView
In September 2005, Sandia National Laboratories achieved a turnkey distance visualization milestone with the latest release of ParaView, an open source visualization tool. High energy density physics (HEDP) analysts in New Mexico visualized terabyte-sized data from ASC Purple in California. Though Purple has no specialized graphics hardware such as accelerated graphics cards, and the link itself is encrypted, the out-of-the-box solution of ParaView’s client/server architecture delivered results that delighted analysts.
“Wow,” was one customer’s reaction, in comparing ParaView’s performance to other tools. ParaView delivered a 2x increase in performance for modest sized data (27 million unstructured cells), and was the only usable tool for an HEDP dataset consisting of 274 million unstructured cells.
This achievement is remarkable in part because it used the current release version of ParaView (2.4.4), which includes important Sandia contributions. We expect this work to have impact on a wide range of problems at other institutions, through the code available for download at http://www.paraview.org.
Diagram of recent distance visualization achieved with ParaView 2.4.4. Sandia analysts investigated data on ASC Purple, using the current release of ParaView, 2.4.4. This technology is available out of the box. Users can download the code bundled at www.paraview.org.
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