Variations in High Performance Computing (HPC) system software configurations mean that applications are typically configured and built for specific HPC environments. Building applications can require a significant investment of time and effort for application users and requires application users to have additional technical knowledge. Linux container technologies such as Docker and Charliecloud bring great benefits to the application development, build and deployment processes. While cloud platforms already widely support containers, HPC systems still have non-uniform support of container technologies. In this work, we propose a unified runtime framework - Build and Execution Environment (BEE) across both HPC and cloud platforms that allows users to run their containerized HPC applications across all supported platforms without modification. We design four BEE backends for four different classes of HPC or cloud platform so that together they cover the majority of mainstream computing platforms for HPC users. Evaluations show that BEE provides an easy-to-use unified user interface, execution environment, and comparable performance.

In this paper, we propose BeeFlow - an in situ analysis enabled workflow management system across multiple platforms using Docker containers. BeeFlow can support both traditional workflows as well as workflows with in situ analysis. BeeFlow leverages Docker containers to provide a portable, flexible, and reproducible workflow management system across HPC and cloud platforms. We showcase how current in situ visualization workflows can apply BeeFlow with DOE production codes VPIC and Flecsale.

As computer architectures become increasingly heterogeneous the need for algorithms and applications that can exploit these new architectures grows more pressing. This paper demonstrates that co-designing a multi-architecture, multi-scale, highly optimized framework with its associated plasma-physics application can provide both portability across CPUs and accelerators and high performance. Our framework utilizes multiple abstraction layers in order to maximize code reuse between architectures while providing low-level abstractions to incorporate architecture-specific optimizations such as vectorization or hardware fused multiply-add. We describe a co-design process used to enable a plasma physics application to scale well to large systems while also improving on both the accuracy and speed of the simulations. Optimized multi-core results will be presented to demonstrate ability to isolate large amounts of computational work with minimal communication.

Direct volume rendering is a commonly used technique in visualization applications. Many of these applications require sophisticated shading models to capture subtle lighting effects and characteristics of volumetric data and materials. For many volumes, homogeneous regions pose problems for typical gradient-based surface shading. Many common objects and natural phenomena exhibit visual quality that cannot be captured using simple lighting models or cannot be solved at interactive rates using more sophisticated methods. We present a simple yet effective interactive shading model which captures volumetric light attenuation effects that incorporates volumetric shadows, an approximation to phase functions, an approximation to forward scattering, and chromatic attenuation that provides the subtle appearance of translucency. We also present a technique for volume displacement or perturbation that allows realistic interactive modeling of high frequency detail for both real and synthetic volumetric data.

Global circulation models are used to gain an understanding of the processes that affect the Earth's climate and may ultimately be used to assess the impact of humanity's activities on it. The POP ocean model developed at Los Alamos is an example of such a global circulation model that is being used to investigate the role of the ocean in the climate system. Data output from POP has traditionally been visualized using video technology which precludes rapid modification of visualization parameters and techniques. This paper describes a visualization system that leverages high speed graphics hardware, specifically texture mapping hardware, to accelerate data exploration to interactive rates. We describe the design of the system, the specific hardware features used, and provide examples of its use. The system is capable of viewing ocean circulation simulation results at up to 60 frames per second while loading texture memory at approximately 72 million texels per second.