Parallel Particle Advection Bake-Off for Scientific Visualization Workloads

There are multiple algorithms for parallelizing particle advection for scientific visualization workloads. While many previous studies have contributed to the understanding of individual algorithms, our study aims to provide a holistic understanding of how algorithms perform relative to each other on various workloads. To accomplish this, we consider four popular parallelization algorithms and run a “bake-off” study (i.e., an empirical study) to identify the best matches for each. The study includes 216 tests, going to a concurrency of up to 8192 cores and considering data sets as large as 34 billion cells with 300 million particles. Overall, our study informs three important research questions: (1) which parallelization algorithms perform best for a given workload?, (2) why?, and (3) what are the unsolved problems in parallel particle advection? In terms of findings, we find that the seeding box is the most important factor in choosing the best algorithm, and also that there is a significant opportunity for improvement in execution time, scalability, and efficiency.