A Study on Open Source Software for Large-Scale Data Visualization on SPARC64fx based HPC Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we present a study on the available open-source software (OSS) for large-scale data visualization on the SPARC64fx based HPC systems, such as the K computer and also the Fujitsu PRIMEHPC FX family of supercomputers (FX10 and FX100), which are commonly available throughout Japan. It is widely known that these HPC systems have been generating a vast amount of simulation results in a wide range of science and engineering fields. However, there was no much information regarding the large-scale data visualization software and approaches in such HPC infrastructure. In this work, we focused on the visualization approaches where the HPC hardware resources are directly used for the visualization processing, which can be helpful to minimize the large data transfer issue for the visualization and analysis purposes. This study includes both OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) and non-OpenGL based visualization approaches, and also the availability of the GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) handling functionalities. Although it is a short survey focusing only on the post-processing issue, we expect that this study can be useful and helpful for the current and future potential users of the SPARC64fx CPU based HPC systems, which are still in active use throughout Japan.