Multi-Threaded Streamline Tracing for Data-Intensive Architectures

Streamline tracing is an important tool used in many scientific domains for visualizing and analyzing flow fields. In this work, we examine a shared memory multi-threaded approach to streamline tracing that targets emerging data-intensive architectures. We take an in-depth look at data management strategies for streamline tracing in terms of issues, such as memory latency, bandwidth, and capacity limitations, that are applicable to future HPC platforms. We present two data management strategies for streamline tracing and evaluate their effectiveness for data-intensive architectures with locally attached Flash. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of both strategies by examining the strong and weak scaling implications of a variety of parameters. We also characterize the relationship between I/O concurrency and I/O efficiency to guide the selection of strategy based on use case. From our experiments, we find that using kernel-managed memory-map for out-of-core streamline tracing can outperform optimized user-managed cache.