Parallel Visualization of Large-scale Unstructured Geophysical Data for the Earth Simulator

A scalable and high-performance parallel visualization subsystem has been developed in GeoFEM for the Earth Simulator. As part of the Earth Simulator project in Japan, the proposed subsystem is effective for the visualization of large-scale geoscientific data, and can be concurrent with computation subsystems on the same high-performance parallel computer. Moreover, several parallel visualization methods are developed for large unstructured datasets, covering scalar, vector and tensor fields. Furthermore, a number of strategies are adopted in order to improve the parallel performance of the proposed subsystem for the Earth simulator, including the three-level hybrid parallelization and dynamic load balancing. Good visualization images and high parallel performance have been obtained on a Hitachi SR8000 for large unstructured geoscientific data sets, and thus demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method for use on the Earth Simulator.