The analysis of coherent structures is a common problem in many scientific domains ranging from astrophysics to combustion, fusion, and materials science. The data from three-dimensional simulations are analyzed to detect the structures, extract statistics on them, and track them over time to gain insights into the phenomenon being modeled. This analysis is typically done off-line, using data that have been written out by the simulations. However, the move towards extreme scale architectures, with multi-core processors and graphical processing units, will affect how such analysis is done as it is unlikely that the systems will support the I/O bandwidth required for off-line analysis. Moving the analysis in-situ is a solution only if we know a priori what analysis will be done, as well as the algorithms used and their parameter settings. Even then, we need to ensure that this will not substantially increase the memory requirements or the data movement as the former will be limited and the latter will be expensive. In the Exa-DM project, a collaboration between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of Minnesota, we are exploring ways in which we can address the conflicting demands of coherent structure analysis of simulation data and the architecture of …