Grid-distributed visualizations using connectionless protocols

The NERSC and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory visualization group has developed the Visapult tool to attack grand challenge problems. Visapult is a distributed, parallel, volume rendering application that leverages parallel computation and high-performance networking resources that are on the same scale as the supercomputers generating the data. We´ve improved Visapult´s effectiveness using aggressive network tuning and network protocol modifications. In particular, we used a new connectionless user datagram protocol (UDP) to improve network efficiency from a 25 to 88 percent line rate increase for multigigabit networks. This connectionless protocol also dramatically reduces the latency of network event delivery, improving the responsiveness of wide area distributed interactive graphics applications as compared to transmission control protocol (TCP) streams. We believe that this UDP protocol, as well as transport encodings and algorithms that can tolerate loss gracefully, will become a fundamental component of future grid visualization architectures.