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NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division World-class modeling, simulation, and supercomputing in support of the NASA mission

Concurrent Visualization to the Web—An Early Demonstration

The NAS Division's Visualization team demonstrated a new "CV2Web" capability at a recent Earth science project meeting, and at the SC09 supercomputing conference.

Time-step of an fvGCM of Earth's atmosphere
Screen shot of a web browser showing an image produced from the latest time-step of an fvGCM (finite-volume General Circulation Model) run in progress on Pleiades. The web page refreshes at a regular interval automatically, loading the latest images as they are produced. Future versions of CV2Web will support animation and video.

The CV2Web visualization capability provides NASA high-end computing users with a simple means for accessing real-time visualizations of their computations. This capability was developed as part of the CAMVis (Coupling NASA Advanced Multi-scale modeling and concurrent Visualization systems) project, established to support multiple NASA Earth Science missions in improving predictions of tropical high-impact weather.

The new capability of the hyperwall-based concurrent visualization pipeline enables real-time web access to concurrent visualization products, and leverages the InfiniBand communications fabric between the Pleiades supercomputer and hyperwall 2 visualization system. This gives users with instrumented codes the ability to see multiple visualizations of their running simulations via a web browser, from any location. One such application utilizing this new visualization tool is an atmospheric model, finite volume General Circulation Model (fvGCM).

The current version of CV2Web supports real-time image updates for each visualization, and subsequent versions will support animation and video.