SIParCS 2019 - Henry O'Meara

In-Situ Visualization for Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS)

Recorded Talk

The Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) is a global weather and climate modeling code with regional refinement capabilities. This project aims to achieve in-situ visualization of MPAS-Atmosphere utilizing ParaView Catalyst, which is built on top of the Visualization Toolkit (VTK). The Catalyst application programming interface allows for ParaView analysis and visualization capabilities to run concurrently with a simulation model. Traditional visualization methods involve writing raw data to disk and then doing post-processing, whereas in-situ visualization can be used to visualize data in real time as it is being produced by the simulation. This method of in-situ visualization yields several desirable characteristics, namely the reduction of the amount of data written to disk and the amount of time required to visualize a simulation.

There are two main components to in-situ visualization with Catalyst. First, an adaptor is responsible for converting data structures of the simulation into VTK objects that the Catalyst library can process. In the case of MPAS, this means converting various atmospheric fields into VTK objects at a predetermined frequency. The second major component is a pipeline. The pipeline is responsible for pushing VTK objects to the ParaView server so that ParaView can render images. This presentation gives a brief overview of the work on both the adaptor and pipeline.

Mentor: Supreeth Suresh, Matt Rehme

Slides