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Middleton, Don

Publications and source records attributed to Middleton, Don.

Parallel analysis tools and new visualization techniques for ultra-large climate data set

ParVis was a project funded under LAB 10-05: “Earth System Modeling: Advanced Scientific Visualization of Ultra-Large Climate Data Sets”. Argonne was the lead lab with partners at PNNL, SNL, NCAR and UC-Davis. This report covers progress from January 1st, 2013 through Dec 1st, 2014. Two previous reports covered the period from Summer, 2010, through September 2011 and October 2011 through December 2012, respectively. While the project was originally planned to end on April 30, 2013, personnel and priority changes allowed many of the institutions to continue work through FY14 using existing funds. A primary focus of ParVis was introducing parallelism to climate model analysis to greatly reduce the time-to-visualization for ultra-large climate data sets. Work in the first two years was conducted on two tracks with different time horizons: one track to provide immediate help to climate scientists already struggling to apply their analysis to existing large data sets and another focused on building a new data-parallel library and tool for climate analysis and visualization that will give the field a platform for performing analysis and visualization on ultra-large datasets for the foreseeable future. In the final 2 years of the project, we focused mostly on the new data-parallel library and associated tools for climate analysis and visualization.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

ParNCL and ParGAL: Data-parallel Tools for Postprocessing of Large-scale Earth Science Data

Earth science high-performance applications often require extensive analysis of their output in order to complete the scien- tific goals or produce a visual image or animation. Often this analysis cannot be done in situ because it requires calculating time-series statistics from state sampled over the entire length of the run or analyzing the relationship between similar time series from previous simulations or observations. Many of the tools used for this postprocessing are not themselves high- performance applications, but the new Parallel Gridded Analysis Library (ParGAL) provides high-performance data-parallel versions of several common analysis algorithms for data from a structured or unstructured grid simulation. The library builds on several scalable systems, including the Mesh Oriented DataBase (MOAB), a library for representing mesh data that sup- ports structured, unstructured finite element, and polyhedral grids; the Parallel-NetCDF (PNetCDF) library; and Intrepid, an extensible library for computing operators (such as gradient, curl, and divergence) acting on discretized fields. We have used ParGAL to implement a parallel version of the NCAR Command Language (NCL) a scripting language widely used in the climate community for analysis and visualization. The data-parallel algorithms in ParGAL/ParNCL are both higher performing and more flexible than their serial counterparts.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

ESG-CET Final Progress Title

Drawing to a close after five years of funding from DOE's ASCR and BER program offices, the SciDAC-2 project called the Earth System Grid (ESG) Center for Enabling Technologies has successfully established a new capability for serving data from distributed centers. The system enables users to access, analyze, and visualize data using a globally federated collection of networks, computers and software. The ESG software - now known as the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) - has attracted a broad developer base and has been widely adopted so that it is now being utilized in serving the most comprehensive multi-model climate data sets in the world. The system is used to support international climate model intercomparison activities as well as high profile U.S. DOE, NOAA, NASA, and NSF projects. It currently provides more than 25,000 users access to more than half a petabyte of climate data (from models and from observations) and has enabled over a 1,000 scientific publications.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗