ParaView catalyst: Enabling in situ data analysis and visualization

Computer simulations are growing in sophistication and producing results of ever greater fidelity. This trend has been enabled by advances in numerical methods and increasing computing power. Yet these advances come with several costs including massive increases in data size, difficulties examining output data, challenges in configuring simulation runs, and difficulty debugging running codes. Interactive visualization tools, like ParaView, have been used for postprocessing of simulation results. However, the increasing data sizes, and limited storage and bandwidth make high fidelity post-processing impractical. In situ analysis is recognized as one of the ways to address these challenges. In situ analysis moves some of the post-processing tasks in line with the simulation code thus short circuiting the need to communicate the data between the simulation and analysis via storage. ParaView Catalyst is a data processing and visualization library that enables in situ analysis and visualization. Built on and designed to interoperate with the standard visualization toolkit VTK and the ParaView application, Catalyst enables simulations to intelligently perform analysis, generate relevant output data, and visualize results concurrent with a running simulation. In this paper, we provide an overview of the Catalyst framework and some of the success stories.