SENSEI in situ

Overview

This project takes aim at a set of research challenges for enabling scientific knowledge discovery within the context of in situ processing at extreme-scale concurrency. This work is motivated by a widening gap between FLOPs and I/O capacity which will make full-resolution, I/O-intensive post hoc analysis prohibitively expensive, if not impossible.

We focus on new algorithms for analysis, and visualization – topological, geometric, statistical analysis, flow field analysis, pattern detection and matching – suitable for use in an in situ context aimed specifically at enabling scientific knowledge discovery in several exemplar application areas of importance to DOE.

Complementary to the in situ algorithmic work, we focus on several leading in situ infrastructures, and tackle research questions germane to enabling new algorithms to run at scale across a diversity of existing in situ implementations.

Our intent is to move the field of in situ processing in a direction where it may ultimately be possible to write an algorithm once, then have it execute in one of several different in situ software implementations. The combination of algorithmic and infrastructure work is grounded in direct interactions with specific application code teams, all of which are engaged in their own R&D aimed at evolving to the exascale.

Funding

This work is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, through the grant “Scalable Analysis Methods and In Situ Infrastructure for Extreme Scale Knowledge Discovery,” program manager Dr. Laura Biven.