Scalable parallel building blocks for custom data analysis

We present a set of building blocks that provide scalable data movement capability to computational scientists and visualization researchers for writing their own parallel analysis. The set includes scalable tools for domain decomposition, process assignment, parallel I/O, global reduction, and local neighborhood communicationtasks that are common across many analysis applications. The global reduction is performed with a new algorithm, described in this paper, that efficiently merges blocks of analysis results into a smaller number of larger blocks. The merging is configurable in the number of blocks that are reduced in each round, the number of rounds, and the total number of resulting blocks. We highlight the use of our library in two analysis applications: parallel streamline generation and parallel Morse-Smale topological analysis. The first case uses an existing local neighborhood communication algorithm, whereas the latter uses the new merge algorithm.