Cactus and Visapult: An ultra-high performance grid-distributed visualization architecture using connectionless protocols
E. Wes Bethel, John M. Shalf · University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) · 2002
This past decade has seen rapid growth in the size,resolution, and complexity of Grand Challenge simulation codes. Thistrend is accompanied by a trend towards multinational, multidisciplinaryteams who carry out this research in distributed teams, and thecorresponding growth of Grid infrastructure to support these widelydistributed Virtual Organizations. As the number and diversity ofdistributed teams grow, the need for visualization tools to analyze anddisplay multi-terabyte, remote data becomes more pronounced and moreurgent. One such tool that has been successfully used to address thisproblem is Visapult. Visapult is a parallel visualization tool thatemploys Grid-distributed components, latency tolerant visualization andgraphics algorithms, along with high performance network I/O in order toachieve effective remote analysis of massive datasets. In this paper wediscuss improvements to network bandwidth utilization and responsivenessof the Visapult application that result from using connectionlessprotocols to move data payload between the distributed Visapultcomponents and a Grid-enabled, high performance physics simulation usedto study gravitational waveforms of colliding black holes: The Cactuscode. These improvements have boosted Visapult's network efficiency to88-96 percent of the maximum theoretical available bandwidth onmulti-gigabit Wide Area Networks, and greatly enhanced interactivity.Such improvements are critically important for future development ofeffective interactive Grid applications.