John E. Stone, Peter Messmer, Robert Sisneros, and Klaus Schulten.
High performance molecular visualization: In-situ and parallel
rendering with EGL.
2016 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing
Symposium Workshop (IPDPSW), pp. 1014-1023, 2016.
(PMC: PMC5061511)
STON2016B
Large scale molecular dynamics simulations produce terabytes of
data that is impractical to transfer to remote facilities.
It is therefore necessary to perform visualization tasks in-situ as
the data are generated, or by running interactive remote
visualization sessions and batch analyses co-located
with direct access to high performance storage systems.
A significant challenge for deploying visualization software within
clouds, clusters, and supercomputers involves the operating system
software required to initialize and manage graphics acceleration hardware.
Recently, it has become possible for applications to use the
Embedded-system Graphics Library (EGL) to eliminate the
requirement for windowing system software on compute nodes,
thereby eliminating a significant obstacle to broader use of
high performance visualization applications.
We outline the potential benefits of this approach in the
context of visualization applications used in the cloud, on
commodity clusters, and supercomputers.
We discuss the implementation of EGL support in VMD, a widely used
molecular visualization application,
and we outline benefits of the approach for molecular visualization tasks on
petascale computers, clouds, and remote visualization servers.
We then provide a brief evaluation of the use of EGL in VMD, with tests
using developmental graphics drivers on conventional workstations
and on Amazon EC2 G2 GPU-accelerated cloud instance types.
We expect that the techniques described here will be of broad
benefit to many other visualization applications.
Download Full Text
The manuscripts available on our site are provided for your personal
use only and may not be retransmitted or redistributed without written
permissions from the paper's publisher and author. You may not upload any
of this site's material to any public server, on-line service, network, or
bulletin board without prior written permission from the publisher and
author. You may not make copies for any commercial purpose. Reproduction
or storage of materials retrieved from this web site is subject to the
U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, Title 17 U.S.C.
