The dawn of interactive supercomputing

Imagine you can see the results of you calculations on a supercomputer in real-time. At SC14 we showed, in the world's largest live in-situ visualisation running on 1024 GPUs, that it is possible (1,2,3,4).

In collaboration with NVIDIA, SURFsara has developed a custom massively parallel volumetric splatting visualization engine. Currently it has a single purpose to only visualize output from the Bonsai gravitational tree-code. However, a lot of technology that was developed is transferable to other applications.

The future plan is to learn from this experience about what is required to achieve interactive supercomputing on scale. I'm currently writing a detailed technical blog-post article about this to explain what we have done.

In the meantime, the source code of Bonsai renderer is available at github.