A National Collaboratory to Advance the Science of High Temperature Plasma Physics for Magnetic Fusion

Abstract

This report summarizes the work of the University of Utah, which was a member of the National Fusion Collaboratory (NFC) Project funded by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) under the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program (SciDAC) to develop a persistent infrastructure to enable scientific collaboration for magnetic fusion research. A five year project that was initiated in 2001, it the NFC built on the past collaborative work performed within the U.S. fusion community and added the component of computer science research done with the USDOE Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computer Research. The project was itself a collaboration, itself uniting fusion scientists from General Atomics, MIT, and PPPL and computer scientists from ANL, LBNL, and Princeton University, and the University of Utah to form a coordinated team. The group leveraged existing computer science technology where possible and extended or created new capabilities where required. The complete finial report is attached as an addendum. The In the collaboration, the primary technical responsibility of the University of Utah in the collaboration was to develop and deploy an advanced scientific visualization service. To achieve this goal, the SCIRun Problem Solving Environment (PSE) is used on FusionGrid for an advanced scientific visualization service. SCIRun is open source software that gives the user the ability to create complex 3D visualizations and 2D graphics. This capability allows for the exploration of complex simulation results and the comparison of simulation and experimental data. SCIRun on FusionGrid gives the scientist a no-license-cost visualization capability that rivals present day commercial visualization packages. To accelerate the usage of SCIRun within the fusion community, a stand-alone application built on top of SCIRun was developed and deployed. This application, FusionViewer, allows users who are unfamiliar with SCIRun to quickly create visualizations and perform analysis of their simulation data from either the MDSplus data storage environment or from locally stored HDF5 files. More advanced tools for visualization and analysis also were created in collaboration with the SciDAC Center for Extended MHD Modeling. Versions of SCIRun with the FusionViewer have been made available to fusion scientists on the Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unix based platforms and have been downloaded 1163 times. SCIRun has been used with NIMROD, M3D, BOUT fusion simulation data as well as simulation data from other SciDAC application areas (e.g., Astrophysics). The subsequent visualization results - including animations - have been incorporated into invited talks at multiple APS/DPP meetings as well as peer reviewed journal articles. As an example, SCIRun was used for the visualization and analysis of a NIMROD simulation of a disruption that occurred in a DIII-D experiment. The resulting animations and stills were presented as part of invited talks at APS/DPP meetings and the SC04 conference in addition to being highlighted in the NIH/NSF Visualization Research Challenges Report. By achieving its technical goals, the University of Utah played a key role in the successful development of a persistent infrastructure to enable scientific collaboration for magnetic fusion research. Many of the visualization tools developed as part of the NFC continue to be used by Fusion and other SciDAC application scientists and are currently being supported and expanded through follow-on up on SciDAC projects (Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technology, and the Visualization and Analysis in Support of Fusion SAP).