Briefs

Scientists demonstrate tools for analyzing massive datasets

June 10 -- As computational scientists are confronted with increasingly massive datasets from supercomputing simulations and experiments, one of the biggest challenges is having the right tools to gain scientific insight from the data. A team of Department of Energy (DOE) researchers recently ran a series of experiments to determine whether VisIt, a leading scientific visualization application, is up to the challenge. Running on some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, VisIt achieved unprecedented levels of performance in these highly parallel environments, tackling data sets far larger than scientists are currently producing.

The team ran VisIt using 8,000 to 32,000 processing cores to tackle datasets ranging from 500 billion to 2 trillion zones, or grid points. The project was a collaboration among leading visualization researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

When DOE established the Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies (VACET) in 2006, the center joined the VisIt development effort, making further extensions for use on the large, complex datasets emerging from the SciDAC program. VACET is part of DOE's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program and includes researchers from the University of California at Davis and the University of Utah, as well as Berkeley Lab, LLNL and ORNL.

VisIt is currently running on six of the world's top eight supercomputers, and the software has been downloaded by more than 100,000 users. For more information about VisIt, visit http://visit.llnl.gov/about.html. To learn more about VACET, go to http://www.vacet.org/.

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