Load-Balanced Parallel Streamline Generation on Large Scale Vector Fields

Because of the ever increasing size of output data from scientific simulations, supercomputers are increasingly relied upon to generate visualizations. One use of supercomputers is to generate field lines from large scale flow fields. When generating field lines in parallel, the vector field is generally decomposed into blocks, which are then assigned to processors. Since various regions of the vector field can have different flow complexity, processors will require varying amounts of computation time to trace their particles, causing load imbalance, and thus limiting the performance speedup. To achieve load-balanced streamline generation, we propose a workload-aware partitioning algorithm to decompose the vector field into partitions with near equal workloads. Since actual workloads are unknown beforehand, we propose a workload estimation algorithm to predict the workload in the local vector field. A graph-based representation of the vector field is employed to generate these estimates. Once the workloads have been estimated, our partitioning algorithm is hierarchically applied to distribute the workload to all partitions. We examine the performance of our workload estimation and workload-aware partitioning algorithm in several timings studies, which demonstrates that by employing these methods, better scalability can be achieved with little overhead.