Data Analysis Services Group - Month Year

News and Accomplishments

VAPOR Project

Project information is available at: http://www.vapor.ucar.edu

XD Vis Award:

Efforts to refactor code to ease extensibility and improve maintainability continued. A specialization of the NetCDFCollection class, developed last month, capable of reading NetCDF Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Conventions data was written. The implementation is incomplete, but has sufficient capability to support MOM and ROMS ocean data. The extant MOM data translators were migrated to the new CF reader class and tested. Most of the deficiencies of the previous implementation have been addressed, and a much broader set of MOM outputs can now be processed.

KISTI Award:

Seunghoon Lee returned to KISTI after a two month visit. While at NCAR Seunghoon collaborated with VAPOR staff to visualize WRF weather data combined with ROMS regional ocean model data using VAPOR. This was a substantial effort due to a number of limitations in VAPOR (data from the two models was required to be synchronized in time, and resampled onto a single computational grid). Seughoon also spent much of his time learning about VAPOR, and analyzing data from various WRF and ROMS runs (Seunghoon is a weather researcher by training). The visit provided VAPOR staff with much feedback on how to improve VAPOR to better meet the needs of weather and ocean modelers.

Development:

Version 2.2.0 of VAPOR was released in early February, and over 500 copies of the software have been downloaded. The major focus of the 2.2.0 release was the addition of support for ocean model data. This work was funded in part by KISTI. Significant areas of work this month included:

  • To work around limitations in the windows 32-bit conversion of MOM and ROMS data (a result of the latest windows NetCDF release), Alan created a 64-bit windows version of VAPOR.  The 64-bit version is now working and has a working installer (there were a number of problems in getting the 64-bit dependent libraries working with VAPOR.)   The 64  bit version will not include the WRF scipy module.  We are trying to get 64-bit IDL to work with it.  We are planning to include this in a 2.2.2 release shortly.
  • OpenGL state management inside of the volume renderers was restructured somewhat to workaround OpenGL errors that were being generated on some Mac platforms.
  • Final regression testing was performed, installers were built and posted to the VAPOR web site.

John and Alan had several planning meetings to discuss CY2013 efforts, which will focus on improved usability, and further architectural refactoring aimed at improving maintainability and extensibility.

All of VAPOR test data sets and support project data was successfully migrated to the new glade.

Administrative:

A number of applicants for our Student Assistant position were interviewed, and a winning candidate was selected: Miles Rufat-Latre, a CS student at CU, will join the VAPOR team on March 18.

At the request of Scott Raider a one-page mini proposal was provided seeking NSF funds to improve VAPOR usability.

Education and Outreach:

Two abstracts for talks submitted by John and Alan were accepted by EGU for the April genera assembly meeting in Vienna.

Alan and Rick Brownrigg (in 2012) proposed a Siparcs project involving visualization of WRF data in Google Earth.  This month three intern candidates applied for this position, we reviewed their applications and found two of them to be well-qualified.

Software Research Projects

Feature Tracking:

Climate data compression:

ASD Support

John provided Peter Ireland with new imagery to be used in an NSF funding proposal.

Production Visualization Services & Consulting

  • Alan has been working with Mel Shapiro and Perry Domingo to make a video of 8 vapor animations of hurricane sandy, based on the work at AMS 2013.  Perry has made a movie that we will be distributing shortly.
  • Pete Johnson, from Cray, has run WRF at 9118x9214x47 for hurricane sandy, on Blue Waters at NCSA.  We have converted three time steps and visualized it in VAPOR.  This (500m) data is providing significant improvements over previous (4km) data and Mel is actively working to evaluate the scientific significance of the higher resolution run.  Pete and Tom Galernlo are trying to increase the vertical resolution of this model but have run into limitations in NetCDF variable size.

Publications, Papers & Presentations

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Systems Projects

File System Space Management Project

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Accounting & Statistics Project

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Security & Administration Projects

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System Monitoring Project

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NWSC Planning & Installation

  • John worked with Si to get ParaView properly configured for parallel execution on Geyser.

System Support

Data Analysis & Visualization Clusters

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GLADE Storage Cluster

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Data Transfer Cluster

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Lynx Cluster

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Other

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