State of In Situ Visualization in Simulations: We are fast. But are we inspiring?

Visualization of dynamic processes in scientific high-performance computing is an immensely data intensive endeavor. Application codes have recently demonstrated scaling to full-size Exascale machines, and generating high-quality data for visualization is consequently on the machine-scale, easily spanning 100s of TBytes of input to generate a single video frame. In situ visualization, the technique to consume the many-node decomposed data in-memory, as exposed by applications, is the dominant workflow. Although in situ visualization has achieved tremendous progress in the last decade, scaling to system-size together with the application codes that produce its data, there is one important question that we cannot skip: is what we produce insightful and inspiring?