Data Analysis Services Group - October 2012
News and Accomplishments
VAPOR Project
Project information is available at: http://www.vapor.ucar.edu
TG GIG PY6 Award:
XD Vis Award:
Depth Peeling
- Completed testing of depth peeling prototype with VAPOR 2.2
- Implemented depth peeling in all compatible renderers
- Began preparing depth peeling to merge into trunk for possible RC release
ShaderMGR
- Continued work on extending the degree of awareness of the OpenGL context
KISTI Award:
John and Alan visited the program manager for the KISTI award, Minsu Joh, and a number of her staff and collaborators at the Korean Supercomputing Conference in Seoul. John and Alan gave tutorials on VAPOR and also gave a talk on VAPOR's new ocean model data analysis capabilities. The meeting went very well and it is KISTI's intent to fund a third year of VAPOR development in 2013. Tentative plans for 2013 deliverables were discussed. Finally, as agreed to in 2012, two KISTI staff will visit CISL for two months starting in January.
- In preparation for out trip to Seoul on October 8-12, we completed initial versions of the ROMS conversion routines romsvdfcreate and roms2vdf, meeting our contractual obligation.
- We wrote a new VAPOR tutorial and presented it in Seoul at Korea Supercomputing 2012. This required a slightly different format because we wanted the attendees to be able to follow us but not necessarily to work along on their own computers. As it turned out, most of the attendees did work along with us, and this help provide lots of feedback during the tutorial.
- We met with Minsu Joh and her collaborators from KISTI to discuss our continued collaboration plans.
Development:
Release candidate 0 for VAPOR 2.2.0 was completed and made available to users in October. Version 2.2.0 will contain numerous new features, many of which are aimed at better supporting ocean model data. Preparation for 2.2.0RC0 entailed:
- Fixing dozens of known bugs
- Regression testing of command line utilities and VAPOR's GUI.
- Updating all of VAPOR's 3rd party library dependencies to current releases, and porting VAPOR to the new libraries.
- Building and testing installers for Linux and Mac platforms (Windows is forthcoming)
We continued to fix lower priority release in preparation for RC1, expected to be completed by the end of November.
Administrative:
Education and Outreach:
- Alan’s proposed talk on Python at AMS 2013 was accepted.
- Alan submitted a proposed Siparcs project in collaboration with Rick Brownrigg.
- Alan attended Visualization 2012 in Seattle. While there he met with Michael and Niklas who are planning a visualization session at EGU 2013 (in Vienna in April) and also a new book on visualization. They would like to have VAPOR participation in both of these.
- DASG will again be hosting a workshop at the Fall AGU meeting on open source visualization tools for the geosciences. The URL for the event is https://wiki.ucar.edu/display/dasg/AGU+Fall+Meeting+Workshop
Software Research Projects
Feature Tracking:
Climate data compression:
ASD Support
- Alan has been working with Peter Hamlington to prepare data for a visualization of his simulation for Supercomputing 2012. He has simulated two sequences that will give a good idea of the results expected when he performs the ASD run.
- Gabi Pfister has a month of data (preliminary for her ASD run) that she has put into Google Earth and would like to show it at Supercomputing 2012. Michael Burek has agreed to help produce an animation from this data.
Production Visualization Services & Consulting
- Both Janice Coen’s and Mel Shapiro’s animations were submitted to supercomputing (with production help from Perry Domingo)
Publications, Papers & Presentations
Systems Projects
File System Space Management Project
Accounting & Statistics Project
Security & Administration Projects
System Monitoring Project
NWSC Planning & Installation
- John developed a number of CUDA workload scripts to exercise the Geyser and Caldera nodes
- John also reviewed new user documentation for Geyser and Caldera
System Support
Data Analysis & Visualization Clusters
GLADE Storage Cluster
Data Transfer Cluster
Lynx Cluster
Other