Designed especially for neurobiologists, FluoRender is an interactive tool for multi-channel fluorescence microscopy data visualization and analysis.
Deep brain stimulation
BrainStimulator is a set of networks that are used in SCIRun to perform simulations of brain stimulation such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and magnetic transcranial stimulation (TMS).
Developing software tools for science has always been a central vision of the SCI Institute.

Visualization

Visualization, sometimes referred to as visual data analysis, uses the graphical representation of data as a means of gaining understanding and insight into the data. Visualization research at SCI has focused on applications spanning computational fluid dynamics, medical imaging and analysis, biomedical data analysis, healthcare data analysis, weather data analysis, poetry, network and graph analysis, financial data analysis, etc.

Research involves novel algorithm and technique development to building tools and systems that assist in the comprehension of massive amounts of (scientific) data. We also research the process of creating successful visualizations.

We strongly believe in the role of interactivity in visual data analysis. Therefore, much of our research is concerned with creating visualizations that are intuitive to interact with and also render at interactive rates.

Visualization at SCI includes the academic subfields of Scientific Visualization, Information Visualization and Visual Analytics.


chuck

Charles Hansen

Volume Rendering
Ray Tracing
Graphics
pascucci

Valerio Pascucci

Topological Methods
Data Streaming
Big Data
chris

Chris Johnson

Scalar, Vector, and
Tensor Field Visualization,
Uncertainty Visualization
mike

Mike Kirby

Uncertainty Visualization
ross

Ross Whitaker

Topological Methods
Uncertainty Visualization
alex lex

Alex Lex

Information Visualization
bei

Bei Wang

Information Visualization
Scientific Visualization
Topological Data Analysis

Centers and Labs:


Funded Research Projects:


Publications in Visualization:


Accelerated Probabilistic Marching Cubes by Deep Learning for Time-Varying Scalar Ensembles
M. Han, T.M. Athawale, D. Pugmire, C.R. Johnson. In 2022 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS), IEEE, pp. 155-159. 2022.
DOI: 10.1109/VIS54862.2022.00040

Visualizing the uncertainty of ensemble simulations is challenging due to the large size and multivariate and temporal features of en-semble data sets. One popular approach to studying the uncertainty of ensembles is analyzing the positional uncertainty of the level sets. Probabilistic marching cubes is a technique that performs Monte Carlo sampling of multivariate Gaussian noise distributions for positional uncertainty visualization of level sets. However, the technique suffers from high computational time, making interactive visualization and analysis impossible to achieve. This paper introduces a deep-learning-based approach to learning the level-set uncertainty for two-dimensional ensemble data with a multivariate Gaussian noise assumption. We train the model using the first few time steps from time-varying ensemble data in our workflow. We demonstrate that our trained model accurately infers uncertainty in level sets for new time steps and is up to 170X faster than that of the original probabilistic model with serial computation and 10X faster than that of the original parallel computation.



Adaptive elasticity policies for staging-based in situ visualization
Z. Wang, M. Dorier, P. Subedi, P.E. Davis, M. Parashar. In Future Generation Computer Systems, 2022.
ISSN: 0167-739X
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2022.12.010

In situ processing aims to alleviate the growing gap between computation and I/O capabilities by performing data processing close to the data source. In situ processing is widely used to process data generated by multiple data sources, including observation data from edge devices or scientific observational facilities and the simulation data generated by scientific computation on a high-performance computing (HPC) platform. For a scientific workflow that is run on an HPC platform and composed of a simulation program and an in situ data analytics or visualization (abbreviated as ana/vis) task, there is an implicit assumption that the computing resources assigned to the workflow keep static during the workflow execution. However, with the converging trend between the HPC and cloud computing platform, running the in situ ana/vis task in an elastic way is promising to decrease its overhead and improve its resource utilization rate. Resource elasticity represents the ability to change resource configurations such as the number of computing nodes/processes during workflow execution. An elastic job may dynamically adjust resource configurations; it may use a few resources at the beginning and more resources toward the end of the job when interesting data appear. However, it is hard to predict a priori how many computing nodes/processes need to be added/removed during the workflow execution to adapt to changing workflow needs. How to efficiently guide elasticity operations, such as growing or shrinking the number of processes used for in situ analysis during workflow execution, is an open-ended research question. In this article, we present adaptive elasticity policies that adopt workflow runtime information collected during workflow execution to predict how to trigger the addition/removal of processes in order to minimize in situ processing overhead. Taking in situ visualization tasks as an example, we integrate the presented elasticity policies into a staging-based elastic workflow and evaluate its efficiency in multiple elasticity scenarios. Compared with the situation without elasticity or with a static elasticity policy that uses a fixed number of processes for each rescaling operation, the adaptive elasticity policy can save overhead in finding a proper resource configuration and improve resource utilization efficiency. For example, one experiment illustrates that the adaptive elasticity policy saves 41% of core-hours compared with the situation without the resource elasticity.



A Visual Comparison of Silent Error Propagation
Z. Li, H. Menon, K. Mohror, S. Liu, L. Guo, P.T. Bremer, V. Pascucci. In IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE, 2022.
DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2022.3230636

High-performance computing (HPC) systems play a critical role in facilitating scientific discoveries. Their scale and complexity (e.g., the number of computational units and software stack) continue to grow as new systems are expected to process increasingly more data and reduce computing time. However, with more processing elements, the probability that these systems will experience a random bit-flip error that corrupts a program's output also increases, which is often recognized as silent data corruption. Analyzing the resiliency of HPC applications in extreme-scale computing to silent data corruption is crucial but difficult. An HPC application often contains a large number of computation units that need to be tested, and error propagation caused by error corruption is complex and difficult to interpret. To accommodate this challenge, we propose an interactive visualization system that helps HPC researchers understand the resiliency of HPC applications and compare their error propagation. Our system models an application's error propagation to study a program's resiliency by constructing and visualizing its fault tolerance boundary. Coordinating with multiple interactive designs, our system enables domain experts to efficiently explore the complicated spatial and temporal correlation between error propagations. At the end, the system integrated a nonmonotonic error propagation analysis with an adjustable graph propagation visualization to help domain experts examine the details of error propagation and answer such questions as why an error is mitigated or amplified by program execution.



Interactive Visualization for Data Science Scripts
R. Faust, C. Scheidegger, K. Isaacs, W.Z. Bernstein, M. Sharp, C. North. In 2022 IEEE Visualization in Data Science (VDS), IEEE, pp. 37-45. 2022.

As the field of data science continues to grow, so does the need for adequate tools to understand and debug data science scripts. Current debugging practices fall short when applied to a data science setting, due to the exploratory and iterative nature of analysis scripts. Additionally, computational notebooks, the preferred scripting environment of many data scientists, present additional challenges to understanding and debugging workflows, including the non-linear execution of code snippets. This paper presents Anteater, a trace-based visual debugging method for data science scripts. Anteater automatically traces and visualizes execution data with minimal analyst input. The visualizations illustrate execution and value behaviors that aid in understanding the results of analysis scripts. To maximize the number of workflows supported, we present prototype implementations in both Python and Jupyter. Last, to demonstrate Anteater’s support for analysis understanding tasks, we provide two usage scenarios on real world analysis scripts.



Ferret: Reviewing Tabular Datasets for Manipulation
Subtitled “OSF Preprint,” D. Lange, S. Sahai, J.M. Phillips, A. Lex. 2022.

How do we ensure the veracity of science? The act of manipulating or fabricating scientific data has led to many high-profile fraud cases and retractions. Detecting manipulated data, however, is a challenging and time-consuming endeavor. Automated detection methods are limited due to the diversity of data types and manipulation techniques. Furthermore, patterns automatically flagged as suspicious can have reasonable explanations. Instead, we propose a nuanced approach where experts analyze tabular datasets, eg, as part of the peer-review process, using a guided, interactive visualization approach. In this paper, we present an analysis of how manipulated datasets are created and the artifacts these techniques generate. Based on these findings, we propose a suite of visualization methods to surface potential irregularities. We have implemented these methods in Ferret, a visualization tool for data forensics work. Ferret makes potential data issues salient and provides guidance on spotting signs of tampering and differentiating them from truthful data.



The Materials Commons Data Repository
G. Tarcea, B. Puchala, T. Berman, G. Scorzelli, V. Pascucci, M, Taufer, J. Allison. In 2022 IEEE 18th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science), pp. 405--406. 2022.
DOI: 10.1109/eScience55777.2022.00060

Repositories are increasingly used for publishing and sharing scientific data. The Materials Commons is a data repository that follows the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Inter-operable, Reusable) principles. We demonstrate the challenges with FAIR and how Materials Commons solves them. We also discuss the Nationals Science Data Fabric (NSDF) [1], a project that is democratizing data access, and show how Materials Commons with the NSDF software stack accelerates data access and scientific research.



High-Quality Progressive Alignment of Large 3D Microscopy Data
A. Venkat, D. Hoang, A. Gyulassy, P.T. Bremer, F. Federer, V. Pascucci. In 2022 IEEE 12th Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV), pp. 1--10. 2022.
DOI: 10.1109/LDAV57265.2022.9966406

Large-scale three-dimensional (3D) microscopy acquisitions fre-quently create terabytes of image data at high resolution and magni-fication. Imaging large specimens at high magnifications requires acquiring 3D overlapping image stacks as tiles arranged on a two-dimensional (2D) grid that must subsequently be aligned and fused into a single 3D volume. Due to their sheer size, aligning many overlapping gigabyte-sized 3D tiles in parallel and at full resolution is memory intensive and often I/O bound. Current techniques trade accuracy for scalability, perform alignment on subsampled images, and require additional postprocess algorithms to refine the alignment quality, usually with high computational requirements. One common solution to the memory problem is to subdivide the overlap region into smaller chunks (sub-blocks) and align the sub-block pairs in parallel, choosing the pair with the most reliable alignment to determine the global transformation. Yet aligning all sub-block pairs at full resolution remains computationally expensive. The key to quickly developing a fast, high-quality, low-memory solution is to identify a single or a small set of sub-blocks that give good alignment at full resolution without touching all the overlapping data. In this paper, we present a new iterative approach that leverages coarse resolution alignments to progressively refine and align only the promising candidates at finer resolutions, thereby aligning only a small user-defined number of sub-blocks at full resolution to determine the lowest error transformation between pairwise overlapping tiles. Our progressive approach is 2.6x faster than the state of the art, requires less than 450MB of peak RAM (per parallel thread), and offers a higher quality alignment without the need for additional postprocessing refinement steps to correct for alignment errors.



UncertainSCI: Uncertainty quantification for computational models in biomedicine and bioengineering
A. Narayan, Z. Liu, J. A. Bergquist, C. Charlebois, S. Rampersad, L. Rupp, D. Brooks, D. White, J. Tate, R. S. MacLeod. In Computers in Biology and Medicine, 2022.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compbiomed.2022.106407

Background:

Computational biomedical simulations frequently contain parameters that model physical features, material coefficients, and physiological effects, whose values are typically assumed known a priori. Understanding the effect of variability in those assumed values is currently a topic of great interest. A general-purpose software tool that quantifies how variation in these parameters affects model outputs is not broadly available in biomedicine. For this reason, we developed the ‘UncertainSCI’ uncertainty quantification software suite to facilitate analysis of uncertainty due to parametric variability.

Methods:

We developed and distributed a new open-source Python-based software tool, UncertainSCI, which employs advanced parameter sampling techniques to build polynomial chaos (PC) emulators that can be used to predict model outputs for general parameter values. Uncertainty of model outputs is studied by modeling parameters as random variables, and model output statistics and sensitivities are then easily computed from the emulator. Our approaches utilize modern, near-optimal techniques for sampling and PC construction based on weighted Fekete points constructed by subsampling from a suitably randomized candidate set.
Results:

Concentrating on two test cases—modeling bioelectric potentials in the heart and electric stimulation in the brain—we illustrate the use of UncertainSCI to estimate variability, statistics, and sensitivities associated with multiple parameters in these models.
Conclusion:

UncertainSCI is a powerful yet lightweight tool enabling sophisticated probing of parametric variability and uncertainty in biomedical simulations. Its non-intrusive pipeline allows users to leverage existing software libraries and suites to accurately ascertain parametric uncertainty in a variety of applications.



NSDF-Catalog: Lightweight Indexing Service for Democratizing Data Delivering
J. Luettgau, C.R. Kirkpatrick, G. Scorzelli, V. Pascucci, G. Tarcea, M. Taufer. 2022.

Across domains massive amounts of scientific data are generated. Because of the large volume of information, data discoverability is often hard if not impossible, especially for scientists who have not generated the data or are from other domains. As part of the NSF-funded National Science Data Fabric (NSDF) initiative, we develop a testbed to demonstrate that these boundaries to data discoverability can be overcome. In support of this effort, we identify the need for indexing large-amounts of scientific data across scientific domains. We propose NSDF-Catalog, a lightweight indexing service with minimal metadata that complements existing domain-specific and rich-metadata collections. NSDF-Catalog is designed to facilitate multiple related objectives within a flexible microservice to: (i) coordinate data movements and replication of data from origin repositories within the NSDF federation; (ii) build an inventory of existing scientific data to inform the design of next-generation cyberinfrastructure; and (iii) provide a suite of tools for discovery of datasets for cross-disciplinary research. Our service indexes scientific data at a fine-granularity at the file or object level to inform data distribution strategies and to improve the experience for users from the consumer perspective, with the goal of allowing end-to-end dataflow optimizations



Comparing different nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques for data-driven unsteady fluid flow modeling
H. Csala, S.T.M. Dawson, A. Arzani. In Physics of Fluids, AIP Publishing, 2022.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0127284

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is known for producing high-dimensional spatiotemporal data. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have introduced a myriad of techniques for extracting physical information from CFD. Identifying an optimal set of coordinates for representing the data in a low-dimensional embedding is a crucial first step toward data-driven reduced-order modeling and other ML tasks. This is usually done via principal component analysis (PCA), which gives an optimal linear approximation. However, fluid flows are often complex and have nonlinear structures, which cannot be discovered or efficiently represented by PCA. Several unsupervised ML algorithms have been developed in other branches of science for nonlinear dimensionality reduction (NDR), but have not been extensively used for fluid flows. Here, four manifold learning and two deep learning (autoencoder)-based NDR methods are investigated and compared to PCA. These are tested on two canonical fluid flow problems (laminar and turbulent) and two biomedical flows in brain aneurysms. The data reconstruction capabilities of these methods are compared, and the challenges are discussed. The temporal vs spatial arrangement of data and its influence on NDR mode extraction is investigated. Finally, the modes are qualitatively compared. The results suggest that using NDR methods would be beneficial for building more efficient reduced-order models of fluid flows. All NDR techniques resulted in smaller reconstruction errors for spatial reduction. Temporal reduction was a harder task; nevertheless, it resulted in physically interpretable modes. Our work is one of the first comprehensive comparisons of various NDR methods in unsteady flows.



Reduced Connectivity for Local Bilinear Jacobi Sets
Subtitled “arXiv:2208.07148,” D. Klötzl, T. Krake, Y. Zhou, J. Stober, K. Schulte, I. Hotz, B. Wang, D. Weiskopf. 2022.

We present a new topological connection method for the local bilinear computation of Jacobi sets that improves the visual representation while preserving the topological structure and geometric configuration. To this end, the topological structure of the local bilinear method is utilized, which is given by the nerve complex of the traditional piecewise linear method. Since the nerve complex consists of higher-dimensional simplices, the local bilinear method (visually represented by the 1-skeleton of the nerve complex) leads to clutter via crossings of line segments. Therefore, we propose a homotopy-equivalent representation that uses different collapses and edge contractions to remove such artifacts. Our new connectivity method is easy to implement, comes with only little overhead, and results in a less cluttered representation.



Local Bilinear Computation of Jacobi Sets
D. Klotzl, T. Krake, Y. Zhou, I. Hotz, B. Wang, D. Weiskopf. In The Visual Computer, 2022.

We propose a novel method for the computation of Jacobi sets in 2D domains. The Jacobi set is a topological descriptor based on Morse theory that captures gradient alignments among multiple scalar fields, which is useful for multi-field visualization. Previous Jacobi set computations use piecewise linear approximations on triangulations that result in discretization artifacts like zig-zag patterns. In this paper, we utilize a local bilinear method to obtain a more precise approximation of Jacobi sets by preserving the topology and improving the geometry. Consequently, zig-zag patterns on edges are avoided, resulting in a smoother Jacobi set representation. Our experiments show a better convergence with increasing resolution compared to the piecewise linear method. We utilize this advantage with an efficient local subdivision scheme. Finally, our approach is evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively in comparison with previous methods for different mesh resolutions and across a number of synthetic and real-world examples.



Quick Clusters: A GPU-Parallel Partitioning for Efficient Path Tracing of Unstructured Volumetric Grids
N. Morrical, A. Sahistan, U. Güdükbay, I. Wald, V. Pascucci. 2022.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34351.20648

We propose a simple, yet effective method for clustering finite elements in order to improve preprocessing times and rendering performance of unstructured volumetric grids. Rather than building bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) over individual elements, we sort elements along a Hilbert curve and aggregate neighboring elements together, significantly improving BVH memory consumption. Then to further reduce memory consumption, we cluster the mesh on the fly into sub-meshes with smaller indices using series of efficient parallel mesh re-indexing operations. These clusters are then passed to a highly optimized ray tracing API for both point containment queries and ray-cluster intersection testing. Each cluster is assigned a maximum extinction value for adaptive sampling, which we rasterize into non-overlapping view-aligned bins allocated along the ray. These maximum extinction bins are then used to guide the placement of samples along the ray during visualization, significantly reducing the number of samples required and greatly improving overall visualization interactivity. Using our approach, we improve rendering performance over a competitive baseline on the NASA Mars Lander dataset by 6×(1FPS up to 6FPS including volumetric shadows) while simultaneously reducing memory consumption by 3×(33GB down to 11GB) and avoiding any offline preprocessing steps, enabling high quality interactive visualization on consumer graphics cards. By utilizing the full 48 GB of an RTX 8000, we improve performance of Lander by 17×(1FPS up to 17FPS), enabling new possibilities for large data exploration.



A Novel Tree Visualization to Guide Interactive Exploration of Multi-dimensional Topological Hierarchies
Subtitled “arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.06952,” Y. Livnat, D. Maljovec, A. Gyulassy, B. Mouginot, V. Pascucci. 2022.

Understanding the response of an output variable to multi-dimensional inputs lies at the heart of many data exploration endeavours. Topology-based methods, in particular Morse theory and persistent homology, provide a useful framework for studying this relationship, as phenomena of interest often appear naturally as fundamental features. The Morse-Smale complex captures a wide range of features by partitioning the domain of a scalar function into piecewise monotonic regions, while persistent homology provides a means to study these features at different scales of simplification. Previous works demonstrated how to compute such a representation and its usefulness to gain insight into multi-dimensional data. However, exploration of the multi-scale nature of the data was limited to selecting a single simplification threshold from a plot of region count. In this paper, we present a novel tree visualization that provides a concise overview of the entire hierarchy of topological features. The structure of the tree provides initial insights in terms of the distribution, size, and stability of all partitions. We use regression analysis to fit linear models in each partition, and develop local and relative measures to further assess uniqueness and the importance of each partition, especially with respect parents/children in the feature hierarchy. The expressiveness of the tree visualization becomes apparent when we encode such measures using colors, and the layout allows an unprecedented level of control over feature selection during exploration. For instance, selecting features from multiple scales of the hierarchy enables a more nuanced exploration. Finally, we …



Localization supervision of chest x-ray classifiers using label-specific eye-tracking annotation
Subtitled “arXiv:2207.09771,” R. Lanfredi, J.D. Schroeder, T. Tasdizen. 2022.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully applied to chest x-ray (CXR) images. Moreover, annotated bounding boxes have been shown to improve the interpretability of a CNN in terms of localizing abnormalities. However, only a few relatively small CXR datasets containing bounding boxes are available, and collecting them is very costly. Opportunely, eye-tracking (ET) data can be collected in a non-intrusive way during the clinical workflow of a radiologist. We use ET data recorded from radiologists while dictating CXR reports to train CNNs. We extract snippets from the ET data by associating them with the dictation of keywords and use them to supervise the localization of abnormalities. We show that this method improves a model's interpretability without impacting its image-level classification.



“Understanding Robustness Lottery”: A Comparative Visual Analysis of Neural Network Pruning Approaches
Subtitled “arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.07918,” Z. Li, S. Liu, X. Yu, K. Bhavya, J. Cao, J. Diffenderfer, P.T. Bremer, V. Pascucci. 2022.

Deep learning approaches have provided state-of-the-art performance in many applications by relying on extremely large and heavily overparameterized neural networks. However, such networks have been shown to be very brittle, not generalize well to new uses cases, and are often difficult if not impossible to deploy on resources limited platforms. Model pruning, i.e., reducing the size of the network, is a widely adopted strategy that can lead to more robust and generalizable network -- usually orders of magnitude smaller with the same or even improved performance. While there exist many heuristics for model pruning, our understanding of the pruning process remains limited. Empirical studies show that some heuristics improve performance while others can make models more brittle or have other side effects. This work aims to shed light on how different pruning methods alter the network's internal feature representation, and the corresponding impact on model performance. To provide a meaningful comparison and characterization of model feature space, we use three geometric metrics that are decomposed from the common adopted classification loss. With these metrics, we design a visualization system to highlight the impact of pruning on model prediction as well as the latent feature embedding. The proposed tool provides an environment for exploring and studying differences among pruning methods and between pruned and original model. By leveraging our visualization, the ML researchers can not only identify samples that are fragile to model pruning and data corruption but also obtain insights and explanations on how some pruned …



Scalable CPU Ray Tracing for In Situ Visualization Using OSPRay,
W. Usher, J. Amstutz, J. Günther, A. Knoll, G. P. Johnson, C. Brownlee, A. Hota, B. Cherniak, T. Rowley, J. Jeffers, V. Pascucci . In In Situ Visualization for Computational Science, Springer International Publishing, pp. 353--374. 2022.
ISBN: 978-3-030-81627-8

In situ visualization increasingly involves rendering large numbers of images for post hoc exploration. As both the number of images to be rendered and the data being rendered are large, the scalability of the rendering component is of key concern. Furthermore, the renderer must be able to support a wide range of data distributions, simulation configurations, and HPC systems to provide the flexibility required for a portable, general purpose in situ rendering package. In this chapter, we discuss recent developments in OSPRay’s support for MPI-parallel applications to provide a flexible and scalable rendering API, with a focus on how these developments can be applied to enable scalable, high-quality in situ visualization.



A Review of Three-Dimensional Medical Image Visualization
L. Zhou, M. Fan, C. Hansen, C. R. Johnson, D. Weiskopf. In Health Data Science, Vol. 2022, 2022.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.34133/2022/9840519

Importance. Medical images are essential for modern medicine and an important research subject in visualization. However, medical experts are often not aware of the many advanced three-dimensional (3D) medical image visualization techniques that could increase their capabilities in data analysis and assist the decision-making process for specific medical problems. Our paper provides a review of 3D visualization techniques for medical images, intending to bridge the gap between medical experts and visualization researchers. Highlights. Fundamental visualization techniques are revisited for various medical imaging modalities, from computational tomography to diffusion tensor imaging, featuring techniques that enhance spatial perception, which is critical for medical practices. The state-of-the-art of medical visualization is reviewed based on a procedure-oriented classification of medical problems for studies of individuals and populations. This paper summarizes free software tools for different modalities of medical images designed for various purposes, including visualization, analysis, and segmentation, and it provides respective Internet links. Conclusions. Visualization techniques are a useful tool for medical experts to tackle specific medical problems in their daily work. Our review provides a quick reference to such techniques given the medical problem and modalities of associated medical images. We summarize fundamental techniques and readily available visualization tools to help medical experts to better understand and utilize medical imaging data. This paper could contribute to the joint effort of the medical and visualization communities to advance precision medicine.



Exploratory Lagrangian-Based Particle Tracing Using Deep Learning
M. Han, S. Sane, C. R. Johnson. In Journal of Flow Visualization and Image Processing, Begell, 2022.
DOI: 10.1615/JFlowVisImageProc.2022041197

Time-varying vector fields produced by computational fluid dynamics simulations are often prohibitively large and pose challenges for accurate interactive analysis and exploration. To address these challenges, reduced Lagrangian representations have been increasingly researched as a means to improve scientific time-varying vector field exploration capabilities. This paper presents a novel deep neural network-based particle tracing method to explore time-varying vector fields represented by Lagrangian flow maps. In our workflow, in situ processing is first utilized to extract Lagrangian flow maps, and deep neural networks then use the extracted data to learn flow field behavior. Using a trained model to predict new particle trajectories offers a fixed small memory footprint and fast inference. To demonstrate and evaluate the proposed method, we perform an in-depth study of performance using a well-known analytical data set, the Double Gyre. Our study considers two flow map extraction strategies, the impact of the number of training samples and integration durations on efficacy, evaluates multiple sampling options for training and testing, and informs hyperparameter settings. Overall, we find our method requires a fixed memory footprint of 10.5 MB to encode a Lagrangian representation of a time-varying vector field while maintaining accuracy. For post hoc analysis, loading the trained model costs only two seconds, significantly reducing the burden of I/O when reading data for visualization. Moreover, our parallel implementation can infer one hundred locations for each of two thousand new pathlines in 1.3 seconds using one NVIDIA Titan RTX GPU.



Demonstrating the viability of Lagrangian in situ reduction on supercomputers
S. Sane, C. R. Johnson, H. Childs. In Journal of Computational Science, Vol. 61, Elsevier, 2022.

Performing exploratory analysis and visualization of large-scale time-varying computational science applications is challenging due to inaccuracies that arise from under-resolved data. In recent years, Lagrangian representations of the vector field computed using in situ processing are being increasingly researched and have emerged as a potential solution to enable exploration. However, prior works have offered limited estimates of the encumbrance on the simulation code as they consider “theoretical” in situ environments. Further, the effectiveness of this approach varies based on the nature of the vector field, benefitting from an in-depth investigation for each application area. With this study, an extended version of Sane et al. (2021), we contribute an evaluation of Lagrangian analysis viability and efficacy for simulation codes executing at scale on a supercomputer. We investigated previously unexplored cosmology and seismology applications as well as conducted a performance benchmarking study by using a hydrodynamics mini-application targeting exascale computing. To inform encumbrance, we integrated in situ infrastructure with simulation codes, and evaluated Lagrangian in situ reduction in representative homogeneous and heterogeneous HPC environments. To inform post hoc accuracy, we conducted a statistical analysis across a range of spatiotemporal configurations as well as a qualitative evaluation. Additionally, our study contributes cost estimates for distributed-memory post hoc reconstruction. In all, we demonstrate viability for each application — data reduction to less than 1% of the total data via Lagrangian representations, while maintaining accurate reconstruction and requiring under 10% of total execution time in over 90% of our experiments.