Collaborative visualization spaces for petascale simulations

Petascale computing is approaching quickly, but the task of building simulations on these machines is daunting. These computers contain hundreds of thousands of processors, and the simulations can run for weeks to produce vital results, which then must be analyzed and visualized. As the complexity of the simulations and computers increases, so does the complexity of the information that they generate. This data must be carefully analyzed by teams of scientist to achieve the desired scientific insights. In this paper, we focus on one aspect of the Fusion Simulation Project (FSP): collaboration amongst OASCR and OFES. The principal characteristic of the targeted simulations is the coupling of several fusion codes. The principal characteristic of our analytics is that it is highly collaborative in nature. The key to enabling the latter is a backend that allows scientist to perform powerful analyses and visualizations using a Web-portal (i.e., our "eSimMon"). Issues such as the orchestration of the flows among simulation, management of storage and analytics resources, movement of the data, and collection of the meta-data are addressed using workflow technologies.