A System for Real-time Parallel Scientific Computation and Visualization using the IBM Blue Gene/L Supercomputer

The rapid growth of seismic, biological, and similar data sets has made computation and visualization an increasingly complex task. Due to the inherit architectural differences between supercomputing and visualization hardware, a system for realtime display of these data sets must be carefully designed. We present such a system, comprising all aspects of computation, communication, and visualization implemented on the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, coupled with a grid of high resolution IBM T221 monitors. We use a socket-based communication scheme to pass computational output to the display, which is powered by IBM Deep Computing Visualization using Scalable Visual Networking. We illustrate this system using a 3-D elastic wave propogation model example.