Data Analysis Services Group - January 2015
News and Accomplishments
VAPOR Project
Project information is available at: http://www.vapor.ucar.edu
WASP Award:
Alan and John spent a day in San Diego, visiting our collaborators at SDSC, and worked out the development priorities for meeting the objectives of the grant. We got a lot of feature requests and bug reports from Larry Frank, the SDSC PI.
KISTI Award:
John developed a draft SOW for the year five KISTI project and submitted the draft to KISTI for review.
2.x Development:
Scott researched and acquired ECMWF GRIB data from eight different modes. Found out from Stephan Siemen and Sandor Kertesz that the ERA datasets are their primary interest for use in VAPOR. Finished a preliminary data converter for ECMWF GRIB data and is currently awaiting a test dataset that Sandor is putting together.
Following a code review, Scott refactored CAM and GRIB converters.
Scott familiarized himself with SeedMe and demonstrated its use. Corresponded with Amit Chourasia about our requirements and that we would need to be able to ‘pull’ video files through his API, which is not yet a feature. He has this feature on his radar but wants to gather more use cases before it’s implemented.
Scott experimented with different antialiasing methods. Disregarded multisampling and supersampling because of performance costs and just applied GL_LINE_SMOOTH to our domain and region frames
Scott investigated why the wizard would produce different results than the command line data converter for ROMS data. Found that the input file order affected the variables that would be converted to VDC.
3.x Development:
Alan has been working on providing a new GUI organization for VAPOR 3.0. He demonstrated the new design with one (barbs) visualizer but we decided that we needed to implement more useful visualizers in order to assess the new organization. Accordingly, Alan is in the process of porting the contour visualizer, which is a fairly big change because it requires porting of the Transfer Function code as well.
John refactored the VDC class objects somewhat to facilitate developing foreign data translators and importers. With the new structure translators and importers can be used interchangeably. i.e. no further effort is required to develop an importer for a new format once a translator exists.
To exercise the refactored VDC code john developed WRF translators/importers for the VDC3 format. The translators are "bare bones" and will need to be fleshed out later to support the full set of common command line options.
Support for the LayeredGrid class was added to the DataMgr. Hence, the DataMgr can now support WRF data sets.
Administrative:
Education and Outreach:
The vapor team worked with Stephen Geinoski with VAPOR website decisions and trimming down excess ‘nodes’ that we didn’t need.
Scott and Alan attended the WRF 2015 tutorial on January 29-30 and helped users understand how to visualize their WRF data in VAPOR.
Software Research Projects
Miles completed a preliminary analysis comparing compression using VAPOR's coefficient prioritization scheme and SPIHT. The results are available from here:https://docs.google.com/a/ucar.edu/spreadsheets/d/1wDW1IH_OUmOi6moGmPyPbE1BgObgerLc9XRLqD2Rx-Q/edit?usp=sharing
Production Visualization Services & Consulting
Alan met with two Italian attendees in Mary Haley’s NCL class who were interested in visualizing their Nemo ocean model data in VAPOR. They want to produce daily forecasts of ocean currents. Alan converted their data and we are waiting to get more data from them for visualization.
Pete Johnsen of Cray (collaborating with Mel Shapiro and others) was able to create a 100m simulation of the 2013 Boulder flood on Blue Waters, and we verified that the rainfall and other predicted variables were consistent with the actual storm.
Jim Schiavone (at Rutgers) has been reanalyzing the Sandy data and is preparing numerous visualizations that exhibit features of the storm related to coastal flooding that were theoretically predicted. In the process of helping him we have found a number of bugs in VAPOR 2.4.0RC0, but for the most part we have found workarounds
ASD Support
- xxx
Publications, Papers & Presentations
- xxx