In situ visualization for large-scale combustion simulations

As scientific supercomputing moves toward petascale and exascale levels, in situ visualization stands out as a scalable way for scientists to view the data their simulations generate. This full picture is crucial particularly for capturing and understanding highly intermittent transient phenomena, such as ignition and extinction events in turbulent combustion. However, integrating visualization into a simulation pipeline has its challenges. A case study of in situ visualization for a large-scale combustion simulation, including design decisions and optimization strategies on domain decomposition, rendering, and image compositing, demonstrates its feasibility. This in-depth evaluation examines an implementation on the Cray XT5 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's National Center for Computational Sciences.