FieldView-VisIT : A Modern Engineering Post-Processing System for Ultra-Scale Physics Based Simulations

Intelligent Light, the makers of the commercially available Computational Fluid Dynamics post- processing software FieldView proposes, under the SBIR project under Topic 2c, & quot;Hardening of an R & amp;D Code for Industry Use & quot;, to integrate and commercialize the VisIt & quot;engine & quot; as an alternative to the native FieldView server. The resulting product would be the FieldView client for graphics, scripting and control coupled with the VisIt Engine that handles exascale data. FieldView has grown from a joint development and commercialization effort with United Technologies Corporation into the worldwide CFD post- processing leader. FieldView has extensive capabilities for post-processing large scale data utilizing High Performance Computing (HPC) systems down to desktop systems. It is considered the best in class CFD post-processing software and has been extensively utilized in the engineering design process by large manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Pratt & amp; Whitney. VisIt was developed by the Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative (ASCI) at Lawrence Livermore National Lab to visualize and analyze the results of terascale simulations. VisIt is a free interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data on Unix and PC platforms. FieldView and VisIt both contain a rich set of visualization features that allows the user to view their data in a variety of ways. Both can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) structured and unstructured meshes. FieldViews backend server is designed for parallel operation on up to 128 processors. VisIt & apos;s engine was designed to handle very large data set sizes in the terascale range more effectively and thus would expand the range of problems that FieldView can address. One of FieldViews greatest strengths is a GUI designed for and refined by engineering users throughout the world. The proposed integration of the VisIt engine with the FieldView User Interface will advance the adoption of the advanced DOE peta and exascale computational and post-processing capabilities. In addition, FieldView & apos;s Extract Database technology (XDB) allows users to create subsets of extremely large datasets. XDB & apos;s can result in orders of magnitude reduction in the amount of data the user must manage. However, this technology has never been investigated with problems at DOE scale. Enabling this, as well as making FieldView more capable by integrating the advanced functionality of VisIt is a win-win, in that the FieldView user base will gain advances developed by the DOE and DOE gain an option for a more convenient user interface. An intuitive, easy-to-use visualization tool that can effectively process data from DoEs modeling tools should enable more small and mid-size US companies (the missing middle) to increase their competitive stature via HPC. During the proposed Phase 1 effort, JMSI shall compare and contrast the performance of key compute engine and graphics operations as performed by VisIt and FieldView. Then, a prototype will be created linking the FieldView client with the VisIt engine to demonstrate the feasibility of more fully utilizing the complete suite of VisIt visualization tools.