  Despite the critical role that range queries play in analysis and
visualization for HPC applications, there has been no comprehensive analysis of
indices that are designed to accelerate range queries and the extent to which
they are viable in an HPC setting. In this state of the practice paper we
present the first such evaluation, examining 20 open-source C and C++ libraries
that support range queries. Contributions of this paper include answering the
following questions: which of the implementations are viable in an HPC setting,
how do these libraries compare in terms of build time, query time, memory
usage, and scalability, what are other trade-offs between these
implementations, is there a single overall best solution, and when does a brute
force solution offer the best performance? We also share key insights learned
during this process that can assist both HPC application scientists and spatial
index developers.
