FieldView-VisIt: A Modern Engineering Post-Processing System for Ultra-Scale Physics Based Simulations

Many U.S. manufacturers need advanced simulation tools to maintain competitiveness in the world marketplace. The Department of Energy has developed several advanced simulation codes that could help, but the tools are too difficult for engineers in U.S. industry to use. VisIt is one such code that is proposed to be harder for use by industry. The Phase I was designed to address high risk integration questions between FieldView and VisIt. In Phase II the research is designed to quickly contribute to the VisIt Open Source Community, demonstrate ability to control VisIt engine processes from a Python based visualization panel from a FieldView Client, and determine how to replace FieldView legacy code with VisIt and Python based infrastructure. In the Phase I research, the key risk factors that may affect the proposed integration of the FieldView user interface and graphics core were studied and successful ways to mitigate them were found. The effort was directed to: resolve the fundamental interface issues in connecting FieldView and the VisIt engine, discover data type incompatibilities between VisIt extracts and FieldView, and then to develop understanding of VisIt engine. In Phase II three prototypes shall be developed: an eXtract DataBase format (XDB) as a binary library contributed as 3rd party to VisIt repository with BSD licensing; a prototype that couples new Qt-Pyside based panels into FieldView that seemlessly work with the VisIt Engine; and finally, research that will lead to prototypes that completely couple legacy FieldView servers or VisIt engines with a new Python based client. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: FieldView-VisIt shall enable engineers in Aerospace, Aviation, Automotive, Chemical Processing, Gas Turbines, Power Plant (Nuclear and Fossil Fuel), and Defense to expand their use of High Performance Computing and Modeling and Simulation. The commercialization strategy offers several levels of supported product to industry.