The CADENS Blue Waters Visualization Project

Donna Cox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

CADENS (Centrality of Advanced Digitally-ENabled Science) is an NSF project to expand visualization of computational science for distribution to scientific stakeholders, the broad public, and educators. The purpose of this Illinois Blue Waters (BW) allocation is to process visualizations of massive scientific datasets for inclusion in CADENS science outreach documentaries and educational materials. This involves analyzing, designing, and rendering high-resolution multi-format visualizations, including 4K fulldome for large-scale museums and high-definition (HD)/4K TV.

The challenge is to efficiently manage, visualize, and render large time-evolving data in high-resolution production quality for wide distribution. Working with these extremely large datasets requires more space, time, and processing power than we have locally. Processing or rendering a single data step may take hours, and it is not feasible to quickly iterate at these scales on our own local machines. Furthermore, when working with BW scientists, these BW simulation data are too massive to copy to our local machines, so we request an allocation to help provide BW scientists with access to visualization as part of the CADENS project. Our 2015-2017 BW allocations enabled successful explorations and renderings of BW data for internationally distributed science documentaries. This proposal enables and expands this effort.