Thu 2 Jul 2009

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations Movie

About a month or two ago, I started working with some people at the ANL Futures Laboratory on a visualization project. In the long term, this collaboration will help us to visualize the data we generate on machines like Kraken using our OptIPortal, as it's being produced. But, before we build a pipeline for rapidly visualizing potential petabytes of data, we have a backlog of other large simulations to work with.

So, our first project was to make a movie by volume rendering a simulation done as part of a DOE INCITE award, that researched the detection of baryon acoustic oscillations in the Lyman-alpha forest.

As described in the movie, the images were rendered from a density field represented by a grid of 2048³ cells. The rendering was done on Eureka, a machine with a bunch of external NVIDIA GPUs. The movie was presented during the Visualiztion Night of the SciDAC 2009 Conference. No awards, but it's only our first try.

The simulation was done on NERSC's IBM Power3, Seaborg, using our lab's code, Enzo. Each output was 600GB in size. To visualize it, we developed a new method to reduce the number of fields stored in a dataset. This made transporting the data from SDSC to ANL possible on a reasonable time scale.

I really enjoyed working with the team from Argonne on this. I'll admit that this visualization wasn't that novel, except for its scale, and I look forward to working with them on pushing the boundaries in other areas. It will be great to do something novel with the graphics, when individual datasets are often many terabytes in size.

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