In the UK there are some medium sized HPC systems being installed, funded by the Research Councils. The tier 2 HPC launch event on 30 March 2017 – and made announcements by the EPSRC CEO Philip Nelson and from Susan Morell (Birmingham)
Peter Vincent (Imperial) presented the PyFR higher-order polynomial CFD that works on all architectures -giving 13.7 petaflops on the USA Titan system. He described VTKm for remote visualisation that rendered the 1TB per-frame data in-situ -vis:
… this claimed and showed you could stream video sets from the 1TB data file stored in the HPC memory in this virtual wind-tunnel type simulation, without saving the data first (or importantly moving it anywhere). it used a type of Catalyst within kitware’s range of tools so could produce paraview type effects.
The results are very impressive, and similar systems are being used in other remote projects. It does require:
- knowledge of what you wish to view before you compute
- unable – or difficult – to change the visualisation results (sub-parameters)
- unknown question as to if you should (or can) store the intermediate data – would take many minutes or longer to do this.
- cost of visualisation is include – or added to – the cost of HPC so needs accounting for.
Visualisation Issues and Programming Items 