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In Situ Solutions for Analyzing Large Unsteady Fluid Flow
Analyzing large unsteady fluid flows are becoming one of the biggest engineering issues in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). We are working on a solution. […]
The One Trillion Cell Challenge is Successfully Complete!
Trillion Cell Grand Challenge blog #8 was written by Dr. Scott Imlay, Chief Technical Officer. Craig Mackey, Senior Research Engineer, created the iso-surface. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that […]
Serendipitous Side Effect of SZL Technology
Blog by Dr. Scott Imlay, Chief Technical Officer at Tecplot, Inc. “There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.” — Jeff Bezos In previous blogs, I’ve discussed the SZL (Subzone Load-on-Demand) technology we are using to visualize a trillion cells. In this blog, I’d like to discuss a serendipitous side effect of the SZL technology. It is fairly easy to compress finite-element node maps. It is not entirely serendipitous—we worked hard […]
SZL Data Analysis – Making It Scale Sub-linearly!
Blog #6 in the Trillion Cell Grand Challenge, by Dr. Scott Imlay, Tecplot’s Chief Technical Officer Which came first, the chicken or the egg?—Aristotle In developing the technology to meet the Trillion Cell Challenge we struggled with the visualization version of this classic causality dilemma, and I finally have an answer! But first, a little background. Subzone Load-on-Demand (SZL) Technology As many of you know, Tecplot 360 utilizes a new […]
Scaling to 300 Billion Cells – Results To Date
Blog #5 in the series The Trillion Cell Grand Challenge, written by Dr. Scott Imlay, Chief Technical Officer at Tecplot, Inc. “Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.” — Booker T. Washington In previous blogs, I’ve given the motivation for the Trillion Cell Challenge. In this blog I’d like to introduce the details of the challenge and give our results to date. Trillion-cell CFD Dataset At […]
Intelligently Defeating the I/O Bottleneck
The Trillion Cell Grand Challenge blog #4 by Dr. Scott Imlay, CTO, Tecplot, Inc. Big whorls have little whorls That feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls And so on to viscosity. —Lewis F. Richardson This is a famous quote about the nature of turbulence: the energy in turbulence cascades down to smaller and smaller eddies until, at a certain length scale, the turbulence energy can be […]
What Obstacles Stand Between Us and One Trillion Cells?
Blog #3 in the series The Trillion Cell Grand Challenge is about technology trends and the I/O bottleneck. Forecasting is very difficult, especially about the future. —Old Danish Proverb In previous blogs I’ve introduced the Trillion Cell Challenge and given the motivation for why it is a worthy goal. Now I’d like to start discussing the technical obstacles involved in visualizing a solution with one trillion cells. Basic Visualization Pipeline […]
Why One Trillion Cells?
Blog #2 in the series The Trillion Cell Grand Challenge, by Dr. Scott Imlay Wind tunnels won’t go away—we’ll need them to store the printouts from our CFD solutions!—Dean Chapman, NASA Ames This is my second-hand memory of a quote attributed to Dean Chapman of NASA Ames as he gave the 1979 AIAA Dryden Lecture1. He was joking, of course, but the lecture was a serious look at the future […]
The Trillion Cell Grand Challenge
By Dr. Scott Imlay, Tecplot’s Chief Technical Officer Tecplot’s large-data initiative began several years ago. We’ve spent tens of thousands of developer-hours on removing barriers to large-data visualization: adding parallelization (threading) of performance critical code, optimizing algorithms, and optimizing I/O. Since then, we’ve improved the large-data capabilities of Tecplot 360 dramatically. For example, with Tecplot 360 2014 Release 2, the creation of an iso-surface for a particular one billion cell data set is two […]