From Supercomputers to Desktops: An Interactive and Portable System for Particle In Cell Simulation and Visualization Using Commodity Hardware

Generating and analyzing visual representations of simulation data in real time (i.e., during execution), has become increasingly important for handling the complexity and scale of modern computational models. Traditionally, this approach has been limited to High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments, leaving some researchers, students and educators without resources to explore cutting-edge simulations and analyses. This work attempts to show that powerful scientific simulations and real-time analysis can be made available by using more easily obtained commodity hardware. This approach may enable a broader participation in the scientific computing discovery process. In this paper, we explore how advanced simulation and visualization frameworks can be employed on commodity hardware. We present an experimental system that integrates visualization of a sophisticated physics experiment as the simulation is running. Visualization is presented on a conventional high definition computer monitor and in Virtual Reality (VR). For this study we use a computational steering and visualization system (SCIRun) which has been extended to provide handling of large scale simulation and VR visualization We conduct performance studies of the experimental system using different commodity hardware configurations. Our study investigates performance constraints, and explores techniques to efficiently manage and overcome evident challenges.