VIRACOCHA: An Efficient Parallelization Framework for Large-Scale CFD Post-Processing in Virtual Environments

One recommended strategy for the analysis of CFD-data is the interactive exploration within virtual environments. Common visualization systems are unable to process large data sets while carrying out real-time interaction and visualization at the same time. The obvious idea is to decouple flow feature extraction from visualization. This paper covers the functionality of the parallel CFD post-processing toolkit Viracocha. Two aspects are discussed in more detail. The first approach covers strategies to reduce the loading time. Data caching and prefetching are employed to reduce access time. The second aspect concerns an approach called streaming that minimizes the time a user has to wait for first results. Viracocha already sends coarse intermediate data back to the virtual environment before the final result is available. Different streaming and data handling strategies are described. In order to emphasize the benefit of our implementation efforts, some strategies are applied to multi-block CFD data sets.