Image Credit: Matthew Larsen, LLNL. This image is of an idealized Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) simulation of a Rayleigh-Taylor instability with two fluids mixing in a spherical geometry.
What is Viskores?
One of the biggest recent changes in high-performance computing is the increasing use of accelerators. Accelerators contain processing cores that independently are inferior to a core in a typical CPU, but these cores are replicated and grouped such that their aggregate execution provides a very high computation rate at a much lower power. Current and future CPU processors also require much more explicit parallelism. Each successive version of the hardware packs more cores into each processor, and technologies like hyperthreading and vector operations require even more parallel processing to leverage each core’s full potential.
Viskores is a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for emerging processor architectures. Viskores supports the fine-grained concurrency for data analysis and visualization algorithms required to drive extreme scale computing by providing abstract models for data and execution that can be applied to a variety of algorithms across many different processor architectures.
If you’re not already a Viskores user, learn more about the original toolkit.
