Enabling Interactive Analysis on Cray XT-5 Compute Nodes

Physics-based modeling and simulation generates terabytes of data when evaluating weapons concepts and designs. Interactive analysis of these datasets using established scientific visualization applications is an essential technique used by computational scientists to understand design strengths and weaknesses in a timely manner. This paper discusses how the commercial visualization package EnSight was implemented on the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) DoD Supercomputing Resource Centers (DSRC) Cray XT-5 systems. Given the unique software architecture of the Cray systems, numerous enhancements were required to facilitate process initialization on the compute nodes and TCP/IP communication between the allocated compute nodes and the login nodes. This communication is essential to allow the distributed processes to communicate to a client application running on a desktop workstation. Prior to the implementation of these techniques, interactive data analysis from the compute node to a client-side workstation was not possible.