Scalable In Situ Lagrangian Flow Map Extraction: Demonstrating the Viability of a Communication-Free Model

We introduce and evaluate a new algorithm for the in situ extraction of Lagrangian flow maps, which we call Boundary Termination Optimization (BTO). Our approach is a communication-free model, requiring no message passing or synchronization between processes, improving scalability, thereby reducing overall execution time and alleviating the encumbrance placed on simulation codes from in situ processing. We terminate particle integration at node boundaries and store only a subset of the flow map that would have been extracted by communicating particles across nodes, thus introducing an accuracy-performance tradeoff. We run experiments with as many as 2048 GPUs and with multiple simulation data sets. For the experiment configurations we consider, our findings demonstrate that our communication-free technique saves as much as 2x to 4x in execution time in situ, while staying nearly as accurate quantitatively and qualitatively as previous work. Most significantly, this study establishes the viability of approaching in situ Lagrangian flow map extraction using communication-free models in the future.