Project information is available at: http://www.vapor.ucar.edu
XD Vis Award:
John and Alan are working on plans for refactoring the VAPOR code base, with the goal of providing a more flexible architecture in a future VAPOR release.
The XD Vis Award quarterly report was submitted.
KISTI Award:
Miles completed the first KISTI milestone: the EasyThreads class object has been implemented under Windows, using the native MS Windows thread API. Thus all components of the VAPOR code base that are implemented for parallel execution can now take advantage of multiple cores on Windows platforms.
Miles started work on a program to "repair" POP data sets contain invalid data over land masses: a known bug in POP that will hopefully be addressed in the next POP release.
Scott Pearse joined the team the second week of June and has been actively working on the KISTI project in several areas:
2.x Development:
Alan continues to work with technical support at IDL, to understand the bug we encountered with running IDL on Windows with VAPOR.
Miles moved the VAPOR source code repository on sourceforge from the outdated CVS to GIT. He also assisted VAPOR staff getting spun up with GIT.
Miles prototyped a "version checking" capability that would notify VAPOR users when new versions of the software were available. He is now working with Alan to integrate the capability into the package.
A video conference call was held with the visualization team at DKRZ in Hamburg to discuss possible extensions of VAPOR to support the ICON climate and weather model. ICON, like NCAR's next generation WRF model, employs an unstructured grid. Unstructured grids are currently unsupported in VAPOR. The team is exploring the level of effort required to handle these data.
John fixed a number of bugs in the 2.2.2 release:
3.0 Development:
Development of the 3.0 version of VAPOR was kicked off in June. This will be a major refactoring of the code's internals in an effort to: 1) improve maintainability, 2) facilitate extensibility; 3) enable support of new features that are not possible or practical with the current architecture (e.g. unstructured data). A number of planning meetings were held to identify requirements, scope level of efforts, and prioritize activity areas. First draft API specifications were developed by John to support a more flexible external data format, and to allow separation of the GUI from the vaporgui internals.
Development of VAPOR 2.x will proceed in parallel with VAPOR 3.0.
Website:
Alan and John completed numerous improvements to our Drupal documentation on the website that will enable VAPOR users to access context-sensitive documentation directly from the vaporgui application (planned for VAPOR 2.3).
Miles started learning Drupal and updated several out of date modules on the web site
John organized a meeting with Steve Geinosky (CISL Outreach), Mary Haley (NCL), and Tim Hoar (DART) to discuss the possibility of establishing a consolidated software products web presence on the CISL web site. A common site would benefit both users of these products, as well as the developers. All at the meeting were in favor of moving forward. Steve will present road map options at the next meeting.
Administrative:
The annual report for the groups use of an NSF Major Research Instrumentation Award (Janus) was submitted.
Education and Outreach:
Climate data compression:
John completed work on a HOMME-specific compression utility, based on VAPOR's compression library. A sample set of CAM-SE data was compressed, and then decompressed, and the resulting data returned to John Dennis' group for comparison with other compression methods.
Mohammad Abouali, a Siparcs intern from San Diego State, has been developing extensions to NCL to enable WRF scientists and others to convert their data so that it can be visualized in Google Earth. Mohammad and Alan met with Gabi Pfister, Mary Barth, and Cindy Bruyere to understand their requirements. Based on this feedback, Mohammad made extensions to NCL that enable users to create KML files and images from NetCDF files. Users can map their data to color and opacity and animate the data over time. Mohammad also has provided capabilities of creating polygonal shapes such as wind arrows, flight paths, and shape files. Whenever performance is an issue, Mohammad has implemented his code in C, overcoming NCL slow looping performance.
Mohammad has shown his work to potential users, in several seminars, and his work was very well-received. He showed his work to the NCL team and they decided to support inclusion of his enhancements in the next NCL release (probably this fall).
Pete Johnsen of Cray has computed a 50TB simulation of hurricane Sandy using Blue Waters at NCSA. VAPOR visualizations of this data, on a 500m grid, will be shown at several AMS workshops and at SC2013, demonstrating the scientific value of petascale simulation.
Mel Shapiro is preparing a presentation at an AMS Mesoscale Workshop where he is the featured speaker. He is working with Alan to prepare visualizations that illustrate various principles of understanding weather dynamics in severe storm systems.
Prof. Shuyi S. Chen, of the University of Miami, testified before the U.S. Congress on June 26, on the value of improved communication between NCAR and operational weather forecasting. Alan provided her with VAPOR animations of hurricane Sandy, which she used as an example of advanced capabilities at NCAR not yet incorporated into operational forecasting.
John worked with a user to sort out problems with parallel use of ParaView on Caldera. It turns out that the parallel version of the code had not been configured correctly.
John continued working with Cornell's Peter Ireland on turbulence visualization.