The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
Workshop: Interactive In Situ Visualization and Analysis Using Ascent and Jupyter
Abstract: There is a gap in interactive in situ solutions for HPC simulations. While we have access to fully featured visualization UIs through tools like ParaView Catalyst and VisIt LibSim, we lack in situ in- frastructure to access more general interactive environments like Jupyter. The Jupyter ecosystem of tools provides a rich paradigm for interactive data analysis and is well suited to help expand inter- active use of in situ. The complexity of the Jupyter ecosystem and HPC center security requirements pose challenges to develop soft- ware infrastructure that enables direct use of Jupyter in simulation codes.
With this work, we describe a system that enables simulations instrumented with Ascent to connect to Jupyter. This system allows simulation users to interact with their data in situ using Jupyter Notebooks. The system combines Ascent’s embedded Python filter infrastructure with a Client/Server Jupyter Bridge Kernel design that simplifies both deployment and security considerations on HPC systems. We describe the design of this system, demonstrate basic usage, and describe a prototype Ascent rendering UI built on top of this system.