MICHELLE post processing for large scale problems and HPC environments using ParaView with a custom GUI interface

We present new visualization tools for the recently developed High Performance Computing (HPC) capability for the MICHELLE code. New HPC support has been implemented in the code and its environment over the past two years in support of rapid device design and optimization. Central to this is the adoption of HPC tools and the porting of the code to HPC platforms, which allows for accurate, high-resolution, large-scale models and simulations of multiple beam devices, such as MBK guns and MB-IOTs. Visual analysis and post-processing of simulation results from such large-scale models is a computational challenge that requires advanced scientific visualization tools such as ParaView, which was chosen for our program due to its flexibility to plug-in customization. To enhance usability and efficiency for new and existing MICHELLE users, a GUI plug-in to ParaView with MICHELLE-specific tools has been developed using the Qt GUI toolkit and Python. Here we present a description of the Qt plug-in with example problems, and a review of some ParaView capabilities. Also presented is real-world benchmarking of HPC visualization performance using ParaView in client-server mode.