Interactive steering on in situ particle-based volume rendering framework

Kawamura, Takuma ; Hasegawa, Yuta   ; Idomura, Yasuhiro   

Interactive in-situ steering is an effective tool for debugging, searching for optimal solutions, and analyzing inverse problems in fast and large-scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. We propose an interactive in-situ steering framework for large-scale CFD simulations on GPU supercomputers. This framework employs in-situ particle-based volume rendering (PBVR), in-situ data sampling, and a file-based control that enables interactive communication of steering parameters, compressed particle data, and sampled monitoring data between supercomputers and user PCs. The parallelized PBVR is processed on the host CPU to avoid interference with CFD simulations on the GPU. We apply the proposed framework to a real-time plume dispersion analysis code CityLBM on GPU supercomputers. In the numerical experiment, we address an inverse problem to find a pollutant source from the monitoring data, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the human-in-the-loop approach.