Facilitating Staging-based Unstructured Mesh Processing to Support Hybrid In-Situ Workflows

Abstract

In-situ and in-transit processing alleviate the gap between the computing and I/O capabilities by scheduling data analytics close to the data source. Hybrid in-situ processing splits data analytics into two stages: the data processing that runs in-situ aims to extract regions of interest, which are then transferred to staging services for further in-transit analytics. To facilitate this type of hybrid in-situ processing, the data staging service needs to support complex intermediate data representations generated/consumed by the in-situ tasks. Unstructured (or irregular) mesh is one such derived data representation that is typically used and bridges simulation data and analytics. However, how staging services efficiently support unstructured mesh transfer and processing remains to be explored. This paper investigates design options for transferring and processing unstructured mesh data using staging services. Using polygonal mesh data as an example, we show that hybrid in-situ workflows with staging-based unstructured mesh processing can effectively support hybrid in-situ workflows, and can significantly decrease data movement overheads.