Intelligent Light has created an innovative new SaaS High Performance Computing (HPC) workflow tool developed for customers in the defense, automotive, aerospace industries and academic research.
The Kombyne allows users to subscribe to a range of workflow solutions for HPC Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) jobs, from on-the-fly extract generation and rendering to simulation steering.
Interactive monitoring and control is also available, all with minimal simulation disruption and no reliance on VTK. The need for large files is eliminated via extract workflows and real-time visualization.
“Over the past decade, the convergence of accessible HPC and high-fidelity simulation has created a bottleneck in analysis workflows: writing, managing and reading very large files. Intelligent Light has provided in situ solutions via VisIt/Libsim used to access information directly from the memory of the running solver code,” said Steve M. Legensky, President and CTO of Intelligent Light.
“Based on our experience and customer input, we built Kombyne™ from the ground up to simplify the integration into solver codes and minimize the runtime impact on memory and performance via true ‘in transit’ operation.”
An in transit workflow uses a separate process, called an Endpoint, that quickly receives data from the solver and performs visualization and analysis without interfering with the running solver.
The Endpoint can directly output extracts such as cutting planes, obtain point samples for data science, render images, and it can act as a bridge to popular visualization codes such as FieldView, VisIt and ParaView, enabling interactive visualization without stopping the solver code.
Kombyne is the first commercially supported product that provides full in situ and in transit post-processing, rendering and data science sampling.
Intelligent Light’s Vice President of Research and Development, Dr. Earl P.N. Duque, has been supporting a data science project, using modal and frequency analysis to characterize transonic ‘cylinder in crossflow’ physics, using NASA’s OVERFLOW2 solver, instrumented with Kombyne on the Department of Energy Cori supercomputer.
According to Dr. Duque, “This study required data at high frequency, essentially every solver time step. Using the standard I/O pipelines in OVERFLOW2 would have required excessive wall clock time.
“Kombyne was able to efficiently write the solution extracts to disk in various data formats that could be used by data analysis tools (Matlab) and visualization tools (VisIt, FieldView, ParaView).”
Installation is extremely easy for Kombyne using prebuilt modules for OVERFLOW2, Hydra, PyFR, OpenFOAM, with more coming every day. For other CFD solvers, a small adapter library is used to link Kombyne into the solver.
Kombyne provides native APIs in FORTRAN, C/C++ and Python and is scalable via MPI. In batch operation, a simple parameter datafile sets up the functions to be performed during simulation.
Kombyne comes in two designs: Kombyne and Kombyne Lite, and is supplied via an ‘enterprise open source’ site subscription, with no limit in the number of runtime instances.
