Coupling The Uintah Framework And The Visit Toolkit For Parallel In Situ Data Analysis And Visualization And Computational Steering

Data analysis and visualization are an essential part of the scientific discovery process. As HPC simulations have grown, I/O has become a bottleneck, which has required scientists to turn to in situ tools for simulation data exploration. Incorporating additional data, such as runtime performance data, into the analysis or I/O phases of a workflow is routinely avoided for fear of excaberting performance issues. The paper presents how the Uintah Framework, a suite of HPC libraries and applications for simulating complex chemical and physical reactions, was coupled with VisIt, an interactive analysis and visualization toolkit, to allow scientists to perform parallel in situ visualization of simulation and runtime performance data. An additional benefit of the coupling made it possible to create a "simulation dashboard" that allowed for in situ computational steering and visual debugging.