The visualization community has invested decades of research and development into producing large-scale production visualization tools. Although in situ is a paradigm shift for large-scale visualization, much of the same algorithms and operations apply regardless of whether the visualization is run post hoc or in situ. Thus, there is a great benefit to taking the large-scale code originally designed for post hoc use and leveraging it for use in situ. This chapter describes two in situ libraries, Libsim and Catalyst, that are based on mature visualization tools, VisIt and ParaView, respectively. Because they are based on fully-featured visualization packages, they each provide a wealth of features. For each of these systems we outline how the simulation and visualization software are coupled, what the runtime behavior and communication between these components are, and how the underlying implementation works. We also provide use cases demonstrating the systems in action. Both of these in situ libraries, as well as the underlying products they are based on, are made freely available as open-source products. The overviews in this chapter provide a toehold to the practical application of in situ visualization.
ParaView Catalyst is an API for accessing the scalable visualization infrastructure of ParaView in an in-situ context. In-situ visualization allows simulation codes to access data post-processing operations while the simulation is running. In-situ techniques can reduce data post-processing time, allow computational steering, and increase the resolution and frequency of data output. For a simulation code to use ParaView Catalyst, adapter code needs to be created that interfaces the simulations data structures to ParaView/VTK data structures. Under ATDM, Catalyst is to be integrated with SPARC, a code used for simulation of unsteady reentry vehicle flow.
Running visualization and analysis algorithms on ATS-1 platforms is a critical step for supporting ATDM apps at the exascale. We are leveraging VTK-m to port our algorithms to the ATS-specific hardware and ensuring that it runs well.