In collaboration with researchers at Sandia, Kitware developers have made significant performance improvements to volume rendering for large-scale applications. First, Kitware significantly improved unstructured-grid volume rendering.  In a volume-rendering example for turbulent flow with 100 million cells on 320 ranks on a Sandia cluster, the volume rendered in 8 seconds using the new method, 122 seconds for the old method, making unstructured-grid visualization a viable in-situ option for applications.  Second, Kitware created a new "resample-to-image" filter that uses adaptive-mesh refinement to calculate and resample the image to the smaller mesh with minimal visualization artifacts.  The new filter reduces the amount of data required for visualization and provides a potential performance improvement (more testing is needed).  These improvements were driven by Sandia researchers for the NNSA Advanced Simulation and Computing program in support of the P&EM, V&V, and ATDM ASC sub-elements as part of a Large-Scale Calculation Initiative (LSCI) project. Kitware funding was provided through a contract with the ASC/CSSE sub-element.  Contacts for this work are Stefan Paul Domino (spdomin@sandia.gov), W. Alan Scott (wascott@sandia.gov), and Ron A. Oldfield (raoldfi@sandia.gov).

The image shows an unstructured volume-rendered Q-criterion field for a Reynolds # ~10,000 turbulent impinging jet. The performance improvements enabled rendering (for the first time) of the full unstructured dataset (nearly 2 billion Hexahedral elements). The rendering of this image was supported by the ASC LSCI portfolio.

Contact: Oldfield, Ron A.
November 2020
2020-12237 S

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