Terabyte-scale Particle Data Analysis: An ArrayUDF Case Study

A prime question for plasma physicists is how a fraction of charged particles is accelerated to very high energy.To answer this question, physicists simulate trillions of particles with detailed dynamics and analyze their trajectories. This process requires a range of data analysis tasks with high diversity. In this paper, we present a use case of formulating various analysis tasks on terabyte-scale particle data with a novel data analysis framework called ArrayUDF. The flexibility of ArrayUDF allows it to compose a wide range of particle data operations. We also present optimization strategies to avoid frequent global reduction and to take full advantage of the data locality. Tests show that our optimization methods could accelerate these particle data analysis operations by up to 1,600 times.