Concurrent visualization in a production supercomputing environment

We describe a concurrent visualization pipeline designed for operation in a production supercomputing environment. The facility was initially developed on the NASA Ames "Columbia" supercomputer for a massively parallel forecast model (GEOS4). During the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, GEOS4 was run 4 times a day under tight time constraints so that its output could be included in an ensemble prediction that was made available to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center. Given this time-critical context, we designed a configurable concurrent pipeline to visualize multiple global fields without significantly affecting the runtime model performance or reliability. We use MPEG compression of the accruing images to facilitate live low-bandwidth distribution of multiple visualization streams to remote sites. We also describe the use of our concurrent visualization framework with a global ocean circulation model, which provides a 864-fold increase in the temporal resolution of practically achievable animations. In both the atmospheric and oceanic circulation models, the application scientists gained new insights into their model dynamics, due to the high temporal resolution animations attainable.