In Situ and Post Processing Workflows for Asteroid Ablation Studies

Abstract

Simulation scientists need to make decisions about what and how much output to produce. They must balance their ability to efficiently ingest the analysis with their ability to get more analysis. We study this balance as a tradeoff between flexibility of saved data products and accessibility of saved data products. One end of the spectrum is raw data that comes directly from the simulation, making it highly flexible, but inaccessible due to its size and format. The other end of the spectrum is highly processed and comparatively small data, often in the form of imagery or single scalar values. This data is typically highly accessible, needing no special equipment or software, but lacks flexibility for deeper analysis than what is presented. We lay out a user driven model that considers the scientists' output needs in regards to flexibility and accessibility. This model allows us to analyze a real-world example of a large simulation lasting months of wall clock time on thousands of processing cores. Though the ensemble of simulation's original intent was to study asteroid generated tsunamis, the simulations are now being used beyond that scope to study the asteroid ablation as it moves through the atmosphere. With increasingly large supercomputers, designing workflows that support an intentional and understood balance of flexibility and accessibility is necessary. In this paper, we present a new strategy developed from a user driven perspective to support the collaborative capability between simulation developers, designers, users and analysts to effectively support science by wisely using both computer and human time.