Rationale

In 2001, the DoE Office of Science embarked on an ambitious new program called ``SciDAC - Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing.'' One of the goals of SciDAC is to develop and deploy the computer science tools that will enable computational scientists with DoE mission-relevant applications to take full advantage of terascale computing platforms. While a large number of computer science-centered projects received funding in so-called ``Integrated Software Infrastructure Centers'' (ISICs), the approach to scientific visualization was not integrated across the program. Only a small number of computational projects include specific visualization tasks supported through SciDAC. It is clear that many DoE computational scientists, who use NERSC or other OASCR (Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research) computational resources have visualization requirements that are currently not met.

Objective

We are organizing a one-day workshop dedicated to the identification of crucial scientific data visualization needs. The workshop will not be concerned with presenting state of the art in scientific data visualization. Instead, the workshop will consist of computational scientists and engineers who will present their visualization requirements for current and next generation projects. We will invite leading computational scientists and engineers from across the DOE Scientific Computing programs, with the purpose of having them present their visualization needs. Application scientists and engineers will be asked to provide one-page summaries of their data visualization requirements. We will collect these requirement summaries in a white paper and make them available to DOE for further planning of the visualization program in MICS (Mathematical, Information and Computational Sciences Division), in particular for potentially growing the program. The white paper should be seen as a requirements document similar to the "NERSC Greenbook" for computational resources.

Date and Location

The workshop will be held on 5 June 2002 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, California. At LBL, the workshop will convene Perserverance Hall, located in Building 54, Room 103.

Workshop Logistics and Important Dates

Workshop Registration

In order to ensure a well-focused workshop, participation in this workshop is by invitation only.

Workshop Program and Agenda

The workshop will begin in the Perseverance Hall, located in Building 54, Room 103. Breakfast and lunch are in the LBL Cafeteria, which is also located in Building 54. After lunch, we reconvene in Perserverance Hall, then divide into breakout groups. Locations of the breakout rooms will be announced on the day of the meeting. We will reconvene after the breakout sessions in Perseverance Hall.

• 7:00-8:00: Breakfast. Provided by the workshop organizers in the Perseverance Hall, located in Building 54, Room 103 (same room as the workshop).
• 8:00-8:30: Horst Simon (LBNL/NERSC) and Bernd Hamann (LBNL/NERSC). Opening remarks, state objectives of workshop.
• 8:30-9:30 Talks - Session 1: Computational High Energy Physics and Fusion (B. Hamann, Chair)
  • Bruce Cohen, LLNL (Numerical Tokomak Turbulence)
  • Linda Sugiyama, MIT (Macroscopic MHD)
  • Rob Ryne, LBNL (for Kwok Ko, SLAC), (Accelerator Design)
• 9:30-10:10 Talks - Session 2: Computational Astrophysics (B. Hamann, Chair)
  • Lin-Wang Wang, LBNL/NERSC, Materials Sciences.
  • Withdrawn Doug Swesty, SUNY-SB with input from Tony Mezzacappa, ORNL (TeraScale Simulations of Neutrino-driven Supernovae and their Nucleosynthesis)
  • John Shalf, LBNL (for Ed Seidel, AEI) (Black Hole Merger Simulations)
• 10:10-10:30: Break.
• 10:30-11:10 Talks - Session 3: Computational Biology and Chemistry (B. Hamann, Chair)
  • Daniel Rokhsar, LBNL (Computational Analysis of Genomic Sequence Data)
  • Jacqueline Chen, Sandia-CA
• 11:10-12:10 Talks - Session 4: Computational Climate, Combustion, Earth and Materials Sciences (B. Hamann, Chair)
  • Mathew Maltrud, LANL (High Resolution Global Coupled Ocean Sea/Ice Modeling)
  • Gary Sposito, LBNL/UC Berkeley (Clay Mineral Surface Geochemistry)
  • John Bell, LBNL/NERSC (Applied Partial Differential Equations)
• 12:10-13:30: Lunch (on your own at the LBL Cafeteria)
• 13:30-13:45: Reconvene in Perseverance Hall, Assignments for Breakout Groups (B. Hamann, Chair)
• 13:45-15:00: Breakout sessions
• 15:00-15:20: Break, Snacks at Perseverance Hall
• 15:20-16:50: Summarize findings of breakout groups (B. Hamann, Chair)
• 16:50-17:00: Workshop summary and conclusion. (H. Simon or W. Bethel)

Suggested Speaker Topics

Please prepare a brief position statement (one to two pages) that addresses the following issues:

Considering the potential landscape in five years:

• Describe the size and complexity of your data. Is its size measured in terabytes? Petabytes? Does it span many orders of magnitude in resolution (e.g., from planetary to atomic scale)? Does it consist of a single grid, multiple grids, nested/hierarchical grids, etc.
• Do you envision a need to interact with your computation while running? Interaction might mean a passive examination of partially computed results, or it might mean the ability to alter variables in the code to steer it.
• Do you expect that your data will reside in a single location, or will it be distributed around the network?
• Do you envision needing to use software tools that are distributed around the network? For example, compute might be in one location, and analysis tools in another. Or, both themselves might be comprised of distributed software components.
• What will you require of visualization technology in order to perform your scientific investigation? Where do current technologies suffice, and where do they fall short?
• Please address the extent to which you envision a need for collaborative visualization technology. Some define collaborative visualization as sharing of data files, while others define it to mean multiple participants from several sites performing simultanous examination and analysis of data. Feel free to use whatever definition makes the most sense for you, but please make sure you communicate which definition you are using.
• If you could wish for anything from the visualization community, what would it be?

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