Galactic winds – outflows of gas driven out of galaxies by the combined effects of thousands of supernovae – are a crucial feature of galaxy evolution. Despite their importance, a complete theoretical picture of these winds has been elusive. Simulating the complicated interaction between the hot, high pressure gas created by supernovae and the cooler, high density gas in the galaxy disk requires massive computational resources and sophisticated software. For this purpose, Computational Hydrodynamics On Parallel Architectures (Cholla) has been demonstrated to be a scalable and efficient tool that operates in large, distributed multi-GPU environments at high levels of performance. This additional performance results in unprecedented resolution for this type of simulation and massive amounts of generated data. This raises the requirements for analysis tools that can cope with scale and complexity of the simulated physical processes. To address those challenges, we utilize NVIDIA IndeX as a scalable framework to visualize the simulation output: NVIDIA IndeX features a streaming-based architecture to interactively explore simulation results in large-scale, multi-GPU environments. We utilize customized sampling programs for multi-volume and surface rendering to address analysis questions of galactic wind simulations. This combination of massively parallel simulation and analysis allows us to utilize recent supercomputer capabilities and to speed up the exploration of galactic wind simulations.

银河风——由数以千计的超新星共同作用驱出星系的气体——是星系演化的一个重要特征。尽管它们很重要，但这些风的完整理论图景一直难以捉摸。模拟超新星产生的高温高压气体与星系盘中较冷的高密度气体之间复杂的相互作用需要大量的计算资源和复杂的软件。为此，并行架构上的计算流体动力学 (Cholla)已被证明是一种可扩展且高效的工具，可在大型分布式多 GPU 环境中以高性能水平运行。这种额外的性能为此类模拟和大量生成的数据带来了前所未有的分辨率。这对能够应对模拟物理过程的规模和复杂性的分析工具提出了要求。为了应对这些挑战，我们利用NVIDIA IndeX作为可视化模拟输出的可扩展框架：NVIDIA IndeX 具有基于流的架构，可在大规模、多 GPU 环境中以交互方式探索模拟结果。我们利用定制的采样程序进行多体积和表面渲染来解决银河风模拟的分析问题。这种大规模并行模拟和分析的结合使我们能够利用最新的超级计算机功能并加速对银河风模拟的探索。