Visualization Support

NERSC’s visualization support is currently focused on bringing high performance visualization to the remote user. In addition to installing new visualization tools on both Escher and Seaborg this year, NERSC expanded and streamlined its visualization documentation on the Web. This documentation now includes both online and downloadable manuals, links to vendors’ Web sites, tutorials, examples, application loading instructions for NERSC machines, and other useful resources. Visualization consulting has been integrated into NERSC’s help desk functions (http://help.nersc.gov) to make it more easily accessible.

On June 5, 2002, NERSC sponsored a workshop on “Visualization Requirements for DOE-Sponsored Computational Science and Engineering Applications.” The goal of the workshop was to identify crucial scientific data visualization needs from all of the DOE Office of Science programs. Eighteen researchers from laboratories and universities contributed to the workshop presentations, and another 49 scientists participated.

Issues discussed at the workshop included ease of use, visualization of large datasets, support for parallel and distributed implementations, multivariate visualization (multiple grids, many species, and many dimensions), drill-down capabilities, visualization support, common data formats and frameworks, and better communication between the visualization and computational science communities. The workshop report and recommendations are available at http://www-vis.lbl.gov/Events/VisGreenbookWorkshop-June02/index.html and will also be published in the Spring 2003 issue of the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications.

NERSC staff contributed to several major visualization projects this year, including modeling a spectrum synthesis calculation of a supernova atmosphere surrounded by a toroid (Figure 4), modeling gravitational waves generated during the collision of black holes (Figure 5), and a simulation showing halo particles being tracked backward in an accelerator to their starting points (Figure 18).