| |
 |
| Paper: |
VisIVO: A Library and Integrated Tools for Large Astrophysical Dataset Exploration |
| Volume: |
461, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XXI |
| Page: |
505 |
| Authors: |
Becciani, U.; Costa, A.; Ersotelos, N.; Krokos, M.; Massimino, P.; Petta, C.; Vitello, F. |
| Abstract: |
VisIVO provides an integrated suite of tools and services that can be used in
many scientific fields. VisIVO development starts in the Virtual Observatory
framework. VisIVO allows users to visualize meaningfully highly-complex,
large-scale datasets and create movies of these visualizations based on
distributed infrastructures. VisIVO supports high-performance, multi-dimensional
visualization of large-scale astrophysical datasets. Users can rapidly obtain
meaningful visualizations while preserving full and intuitive control of the
relevant parameters. VisIVO consists of VisIVO Desktop - a stand-alone
application for interactive visualization on standard PCs, VisIVO Server - a
platform for high performance visualization, VisIVO Web - a custom designed web
portal, VisIVOSmartphone - an application to exploit the VisIVO Server
functionality and the latest VisIVO features:
VisIVO Library allows a job running on a computational system (grid, HPC, etc.)
to produce movies directly with the code internal data arrays without the need
to produce intermediate files. This is particularly important when running on
large computational facilities, where the user wants to have a look at the
results during the data production phase. For example, in grid computing
facilities, images can be produced directly in the grid catalogue while the user
code is running in a system that cannot be directly accessed by the user (a
worker node). The deployment of VisIVO on the DG and gLite is carried out with
the support of EDGI and EGI-Inspire projects.
Depending on the structure and size of datasets under consideration, the data
exploration process could take several hours of CPU for creating customized
views and the production of movies could potentially last several days. For this
reason an MPI parallel version of VisIVO could play a fundamental role in
increasing performance, e.g. it could be automatically deployed on nodes that
are MPI aware. A central concept in our development is thus to produce unified
code that can run either on serial nodes or in parallel by using HPC oriented
grid nodes. Another important aspect, to obtain as high performance as
possible, is the integration of VisIVO processes with grid nodes where GPUs are
available. We have selected CUDA for implementing a range of computationally
heavy modules. VisIVO is supported by EGI-Inspire, EDGI and SCI-BUS projects. |
|
|
|
|
|
