Data Analysis Services Group - July 2014
News and Accomplishments
VAPOR Project
Project information is available at: http://www.vapor.ucar.edu
KISTI Award:
Scott continued working on the CAM importer:
- Performed regression testing on the CAM converter with several datasets with/without Z3.
- Found that input datasets must follow the CF convention and have coordinate variables ordered as time, lev, lat, lon.
- Fixed 2 memory leaks during the ELEVATION variable calculation.
- Found memory leaks in NetCDFCFCollection.cpp (assigned bug to John, did not fix)
Alan completed the isolines feature for vapor 2.4, by providing textual annotation of the isolines. This made use of Scott Pearse’s implementation of FTGL text rendering. This exposed a couple of bugs in FTGL but generally the feature is complete. We still need to do a review and may add some additional GUI tweaks to improve usability.
At the request of KISTI John added additional KISTI attribution to the VAPOR web site.
Scott started work on the GRIMS data importer:
- Implemented an OO wrapper upon the GRIB_API to pull information and data from GRIB records.
2.3 Development:
Scott worked on FTGL:
- Built libraries for Windows and Linux.
- Fixed texture memory leak that occurs on Linux (theoretically caused by differences in OpenGL drivers).
- Restructured the TextRenderer object’s constructor to retain texture memory instead of reallocating it each time a ‘draw’ command is issued (performance fix).
John and Miles looked at possible performance optimizations for the wavelet decoder in VAPOR and concluded that opportunities for improvement of the overall decoder were minimal, and tabled the idea for now.
Miles completed the development of a "splash screen" for vaporgui.
Miles started rebuilding the VAPOR 3rd party libraries using the latest versions available. This was primarily precipitated by Apple's Mavericks OS, which is broken with Qt 8.4.3.
3.x Development:
We had a couple of 3.0 design meetings, including a design review of the params library. This resulted in a number of structural changes and better documentation that have been completed.
John completed development and testing of the VDC 3.0 API. The next step will be integration of the new file format into the DataMgr.
Administrative:
Education and Outreach:
Software Research Projects
John continued working with Hank Childs (U. of Oregon) on compression analysis. John provided guidance on making comparisons between data on coarsened grids and wavelet compressed data.
John and Miles worked together to evaluate the SPIHT wavelet encoder that is bundled with QccPack. Miles developed a number of utilities to support compressing and decompressing "bricks of floats", and is now working on error metrics to allow comparison between the SPIHT encoder and VAPOR's coefficient prioritization scheme. Preliminary results suggest that the SPIHT scheme is substantially better in terms of distortion rates, but unlike the VAPOR scheme does not support lossless reconstruction.
Production Visualization Services & Consulting
Scott worked with Peter Sullivan’s LES data:
- Processed and visualized a small sample of Peter’s LES output
- July 24 - Met with Peter to go over his science and what’s visually interesting to him.
- Found that the time resolution of his current LES data is insufficient for 3D vis, so we had 25k hours allocated for him to re-run his data.
- Reprocessed the results of his 25k hour LES run. Did some troubleshooting on an erroneous calculation of ELEVATION in his fortran code.
- Currently putting together preliminary visualizations of his data for a potential submission to SC14’s visualization contest.
Systems
John worked with Irfan's team to develop GPU health test scripts.
As part of the procurement process John and Dave Hart are co-leading the Workflow Working Group, which is tasked with trying to better understand how and why users use CISL's HPC resources. John and Dave have begun interviewing a number of Yellowstone users.
Publications, Papers & Presentations
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Community Service
John served on an NSF proposal review panel.
SCIparCS student internship
Our SiParcs intern Sunni Ivey completed a very productive internship. The goal of this internship was to gain an improved understanding of the requirements for visualizing observational data in VAPOR. We met this goal and much more in just 11 weeks.
- July 1 - Scott gave a presentation to NCAR, NASA, and NOAA scientists involved with FRAPPE/Discover-AQ on Vapor’s capabilities and demonstrated an animation
- July 15 - Met with Mary about further requirements analysis.
- Developed ancillary animations to include alongside the more prominent 3D Vapor visualization using ffmpeg and MatPlotLib. Showed Sunni the process for this and she was able to quickly take over the development of our animations for FRAPPE with little oversight for visual aesthetics.
- Helped Sunni generate a visualization and abstract for SC14’s call to vis.