Ascent Developement Overview

Ascent’s architecture is divided into two main components:

  • Flow: a simple and flexible data flow network

  • Runtime: code that assembles and runs data flow networks to process data

Flow

Ascent uses a simple data flow library named Flow to efficiently compose and execute filters. Ascent’s Flow library is a C++ evolution of the Python data flow network infrastructure used in Efficient Dynamic Derived Field Generation on Many-Core Architectures Using Python. Flow supports declaration and execution of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of filters. Filters declare a minimal interface, which includes the number of expected inputs and outputs, and a set of default parameters. Flow uses a topological sort to ensure proper filter execution order, tracks all intermediate results, and provides basic memory management capabilities.

There are three main components to Flow:

  • Registry: manages the lifetime of intermediate filter results

  • Graph: contains the filter graph and manages the adding of filters

  • Workspace: contains both the registry and filter graph

Flow filters are the basic unit of execution inside of Ascent, and all functionality is implemented as a Flow filter.

Ascent Runtime

The Ascent runtime accepts user actions described in Conduit nodes and uses that information to assemble a data flow network. Outside the Ascent runtime, all functionality is wrapped and executed through Flow filters, and the Ascent runtime logically divides flow filters into two categories:

  • Transform: a Flow filter that transforms data

  • Extract: a sink Flow filter that consumes simulation data or the results of pipelines

Most developers will create either a transform or an extract. Flow filters are registered with the Ascent runtime by declaring the type of the filter (extract or transform), and the API name that users can specify in the Ascent actions.

Note

Flow filters can also be registered with the Ascent runtime by applications outside of Ascent.

What Types of Mesh Data Does Ascent Use?

Ascent supports several different data types, and has adapters for converting between them.

  • Conduit Mesh Blueprint: used to publish data to ascent

  • VTK-h: a simple collection of VTK-m data sets

  • MFEM: high-order finite element meshes

Implementers of Flow filters must check the input data type and apply the appropriate conversions if the data does not match what is required.

Mesh Types

The following mesh types are supported in Ascent:

  • Uniform

  • Rectilinear

  • Curvilinear

  • Explicit

  • High-Order (Blueprint and MFEM)

High-order mesh can be converted to low-order through a filter. By default, all mesh data for transforms is already converted to low-order meshes.

Domain Overloading

Ascent supports arbitrary domain overloading, so all filters should support multiple domains per rank. Additionally, there is no guarantee that a rank will have any data at all, especially after a series of transformations.

VTK-m

Ascent’s ability to perform visualization operations on exascale architectures is underpinned by VTK-m. Currently, pipelines in Ascent are constructed with various VTK-m filters wrapped by VTK-h and then by a flow filter. Although strongly encouraged, Ascent does not need to be compiled with VTK-m support.

VTK-h

At the beginning of Ascent development, there was no support for MPI inside of VTK-m. To augment VTK-m with distributed-memory capabilities, we created VTK-h, where the h stands for hybrid-parallel. Inside of VTK-h, we added a distributed-memory image compositing component and functions that answer global (across all MPI ranks) questions about data sets such as obtaining the range of a scalar field.

Additionally, VTK-m began as a header only library and VTK-m does not currently build a library of filters. VTK-h acts as a stand-in for a library of VTK-m filters, and VTK-h maintains the build system that manages CUDA, including GPU device selection, OpenMP, and Serial compilation. Supporting the range of VTK-m features needed leads to very long compile times, thus VTK-h insulates Ascent from this additional complexity.

In the future, VTK-m will transition to a fully compiled library, and as distributed-memory functionality comes online inside VTK-m, we will transition away from VTK-h at some point in the future.