A Large Data Visualization Framework for SPARC64 fx HPC Systems - Case Study: K Computer Operational Environment -

Leading-edge supercomputer systems have been designed to achieve the highest computational performance possible for running a wide variety of large-scale simulations, and the pre- and post-processing are usually not considered in the main design feature. Although supercomputer systems may have peculiar CPU architecture, the auxiliary computational systems tend to use commodity based hardware and software in the form of servers and clusters. In the case of the K computer operational environment, at RIKEN R-CCS, the supercomputer itself is based on SPARC64 fx CPU architecture, and pre- and post-processing servers are based on traditional x86 CPU architecture. In this poster we present a large data visualization environment developed for this peculiar HPC operational environment, presenting some of the efforts made to meet the large data visualization needs. It is publicly known that the next-generation leading-edge Japanese supercomputer will abandon this CPU architecture in favor of another architecture, but we expect that some of the knowledge obtained in this development will also be useful for this future coming supercomputer system.