In situ, steerable, hardware-independent and data-structure agnostic visualization with ISAAC

Abstract: The computation power of supercomputers grows faster than the bandwidth of their storage and network. Especially applications using hardware accelerators like Nvidia GPUs cannot save enough data to be analyzed in a later step. There is a high risk of loosing important scientific information. We introduce the in situ template library ISAAC which enables arbitrary applications like scientific simulations to live visualize their data without the need of deep copy operations or data transformation using the very same compute node and hardware accelerator the data is already residing on. Arbitrary meta data can be added to the renderings and user defined steering commands can be asynchronously sent back to the running application. Using an aggregating server, ISAAC streams the interactive visualization video and enables user to access their applications from everywhere.