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High Performance Visualization with VisIVO Across Cloud and HPC

Authors Umer Arshad , Eva Sciacca , Nicola Tuccari , Fabio Pitari , Giuseppa Muscianisi

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OASIcs.PARMA-DITAM.2026.3.pdf
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Document Identifiers

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computing methodologies
Keywords
  • High-performance computing
  • HPC
  • VisIVO
  • Scientific visualization
  • Interactive visualization
  • Cloud computing
  • Jupyter
  • Flask
  • REST API

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Abstract

The rapid growth of data in Astrophysics and Cosmology creates significant challenges that require scalable computing and advanced visualization solutions. Cineca is Italy’s largest supercomputing center and a leading global provider of high-performance computing (HPC) services. This paper shows that the integration of the VisIVO scientific visualization framework is with the cloud-based InterActive Computing (IAC) service at Cineca. This integration enables GPU-accelerated, real-time visualization on HPC resources via a Jupyter interface in their browser. A new dedicated Python wrapper and a custom Jupyter kernel enable VisIVO to run smoothly from interactive notebooks, avoid command-line operations, and visualize data directly on HPC compute nodes. Furthermore, we enabled cloud-oriented RESTful APIs, built with the Flask framework, to perform VisIVO operations remotely via simple web services. This setup hides the backend’s complexity and simplifies connections with other applications. Our framework increases system accessibility, ensures reproducibility of results, and supports rapid data exploration for large astrophysical simulations. The system was evaluated using real-world cases, including visual analysis of cosmological simulations generated using the OpenGadget3 code. Results indicate that the system is scalable and reliable, and that it facilitates interactive scientific discovery on high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures.

Cite As Get BibTex

Umer Arshad, Eva Sciacca, Nicola Tuccari, Fabio Pitari, and Giuseppa Muscianisi. High Performance Visualization with VisIVO Across Cloud and HPC. In 17th Workshop on Parallel Programming and Run-Time Management Techniques for Many-Core Architectures and 15th Workshop on Design Tools and Architectures for Multicore Embedded Computing Platforms (PARMA-DITAM 2026). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 141, pp. 3:1-3:11, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.PARMA-DITAM.2026.3

Author Details

Umer Arshad
  • Department of Information Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics, University of L'Aquila, Italy
Eva Sciacca
  • INAF Astrophysical Observatory of Catania, Italy
Nicola Tuccari
  • Department of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Catania, Italy
Fabio Pitari
  • CINECA, Bologna, Italy
Giuseppa Muscianisi
  • CINECA, Bologna, Italy

Funding

The work is supported by the EuroHPC JU under grant agreement No 101093441 (SPACE CoE) and by the Spoke 1 "Future HPC & BigData" of the ICSC – Centro Nazionale di Ricerca in High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing, funded by NextGenerationEU.
  • Arshad, Umer: ICSC - Spoke 1.
  • Sciacca, Eva: SPACE CoE, ICSC - Spoke 1.
  • Tuccari, Nicola: ICSC - Spoke 1.
  • Pitari, Fabio: ICSC - Spoke 1.
  • Muscianisi, Giuseppa: ICSC - Spoke 1.

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