From: Lori
Freitag Diachin <diachin2@llnl.gov>
Date: Thu
Sep 11, 2003 8:31:37 AM US/Pacific
To: kohlja@ornl.gov,
John Shalf <jshalf@lbl.gov>
Cc: diva@lbl.gov
Subject: Re: DiVA Survey (Please return by Sept 10!)
Hi John and Jim,
Let me weigh in a bit on the TSTT item below as I am helping
coordinate that effort - so I can describe exactly what it is
we're
up to...
At 07:59 AM 9/11/2003, James Kohl wrote:
Hi John,
On Wed, Sep 10,
2003 at 04:49:42PM -0700, John Shalf wrote:
> On Wednesday,
September 10, 2003, at 03:32 PM, James Kohl wrote:
> >>What
do you consider the most elegant/comprehensive implementation for
> >>data
representations that you believe could form the basis for a
>
>>comprehensive visualization framework?
> >
> >Sounds
like the "Holy Grail" to me...
If anything even remotely close
> >to this
already existed, we'd all be using it already...
> >(Unless
of course it's the dreaded NIH syndrome...)
> I wanted to
check to see if someone had already found the "Holy Grail"
> and just
forgot to tell the rest of us schmucks that game was up... :-)
I doubt it...
:-) As I've mentioned
before, the SciDAC TSTT center is
working on parts of this, but they are early in the progres....
The TSTT center is not interested in defining a data
representation
per se - that is dictating what the data structure will look
like. Rather,
we are interested in defining how data can be accessed in a
uniform
way from a wide variety of different data structures (for both
structured
and unstructured meshes).
This came about because we recognize
that
1. there are a lot of different
meshing/data frameworks out there,
that have many man years of
effort behind their development,
that are not going to change
their data structures very easily
(if at all). Moreover, these infrastructures have
made their
choices for a reason - if
there was a one-size-fits-all answer,
someone probably would have
found it by now :-)
2. Because of the difference in data
structures - it has been very
difficult for application
scientists (and tool builders) to experiment
with and/or support different
data infrastructures which has
severely limited their ability
to play with different meshing strategies,
discretization schemes, etc.
We are trying to address this latter point - by developing common
interfaces for a variety of infrastructures applications can
easily
experiment with different techniques and supporting tool
developers
(such as mesh quality improvement and front tracking codes) and
write their tools to a single API and automatically support
multiple
infrastructures.
We are also experimenting with the language interoperability tools
provided by the Babel team at LLNL and have ongoing work to
evaluate it's performance (and the performance of our interface in
general) for fine and course grained access to mesh (data)
entities -
something that I suspect will be of interest to this group as
well.
I know that you'll be having a lot of discussion of data structures
(perhaps interfaces would make sense for diva as well, rather than
data structures?) at the meeting next week, and I really hoped
that
I could be there.
Unfortunately it conflicted with another conference
that I was already committed to. If it's of interest, I would be happy
to provide more information about the TSTT effort - perhaps if the
data discussion spills over to the next meeting - I can talk about
it
then. Or I can send
additional info in email.
Lori