Real-Time Volume Visualization for Large-Scale Grid-Based Fluid Simulations on Distributed Multi-GPU Systems

Numerical simulations of fluids including computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) have been powerful tools in many engineering and research area, but they are computationally expensive. In the previous decade, general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) has been widely used in accelerating the numerical simulation, utilizing the high computational power of the many-core and parallelism architecture of graphics processing unit (GPU). Due to the lack of the dedicate memory on the GPU board, distributed multi-GPU systems or GPU clusters are required for large-scale simulations. The lack of sufficient storage is another problem that slows down our research activities. Even the simulation process can been accelerated dozens or hundred times by using GPU, the I/O time of recording the simulation results is time consuming and is storage demanding. Therefore, real-time visualization can significantly be helpful in analyzing the simulation results and reduce the storage. In this paper, real-time volume visualization for large-scale CFD/MHD simulations running on distributed multi-GPU systems is presented. Physics quantities of each partition of the calculation domain are being visualized in every time step on each GPU and then be composed to form the final image, where no data gathering is needed.