VisIO: Enabling Interactive Visualization of Ultra-Scale, Time Series Data Via High-Bandwidth Distributed I/O Systems

Petascale simulations compute at resolutions ranging into billions of cells and write terabytes of data for visualization and analysis. Interactive visualization of this time series is a desired step before starting a new run. The I/O subsystem and associated network often are a significant impediment to interactive visualization of time-varying data; as they are not configured or provisioned to provide necessary I/O read rates. In this paper, the authors propose a new I/O library for visualization applications: VisIO. Visualization applications commonly use N-to-N reads within their parallel enabled readers which provides an incentive for a shared-nothing approach to I/O, similar to other data-intensive approaches such as Hadoop.