The summer months certainly fly by, especially when you are running in parallel…

Anyway, the project has culminated in some working code and interesting test runs on the Longhorn visualization cluster. We are using some actual flow data sets, for example this fishtank:

From LBNL FTLE

or this “nimrod” simulation

From LBNL FTLE

The algorithm was implemented as described in previous blog posts, and will be written up in a paper with the performance results and conclusions we draw. Hank Childs and David Camp made this project possible, helping with everything from design, data handling and constructing an MPI framework. I was also able to use code from my RTPS project to which Gordon Erlebacher is a major contributor.

We have run studies where we fill most of the 4GB of available GPU memory, which we can scale up to more nodes with big enough data sets. One thing I really like from this project which Hank introduced me to is Gantt charts.

From LBNL FTLE

They are a way of showing how much time each process spends on different parts of the algorithm. This one isn’t labeled, I just like the way it looks. I think I will need to do a whole separate blog post on Gantt charts.

I’d like to thank everyone in the Vis group at LBL for a fun and very educational summer! I’m back at DSC ready to put some lessons to good use in the particle code :D