SPARC Data Services for Viz Evaluation

This year Gary Templet led a research project for an ASC Level 2 milestone that evaluated how well Sandia's I/O and Viz software integrated with the SPARC simulation tool. This project pulled in developers to represent a number of different software packages, including SPARC (a parallel aero sim tool), Catalyst (a tool for exporting data for visualization), IOSS (a mesh I/O library), NGW (a workflow tool), and FAODEL (data management services). While the pandemic forced us to limit the scale at which we could conduct runs, we were able to get a functional workflow up and running on the Mutrino Cray platform and extract performance results.

This work forced us to improve the IOSS code for connecting with FAODEL, as well as refine the FAODEL code to make it more robust. The Catalyst team did an excellent job of providing hooks that allowed us to route data through FAODEL or Catalyst to render results. FAODEL also received updates to allow us to trace timing events in the system. In the end we demonstrated that the FAODEL workflows worked and could be configured to behave differently, but the overall complexity of the system was high enough that we would need additional configuration support from the workflow engine to make the approach practical for analysts.

Publications

• SAND Report Gary Templet et. al., "Data Services for Visualization and Analysis - ASC Level II Milestone (7186)" SAND2020-9451