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Re: [SCIRUN-USERS] applying scirun to plasma physics?


Chronological Thread 
  • From: David Weinstein <dmw@sci.utah.edu>
  • To: Paulo Tribolet Abreu <paulotex@gmx.net>
  • Cc: scirun-users@sci.utah.edu
  • Subject: Re: [SCIRUN-USERS] applying scirun to plasma physics?
  • Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 19:44:41 -0700

Hi Paulo,

While SCIRun has been used for quite a bit of medical visualization, it is also being used for a variety of other application domains, including geophysics, combustion, atmospherics, and fusion just to name a few. And while it is also true that visualization is one of the areas that we are best known for at SCI, the true strength of SCIRun is as a software architecture for integrating modeling, simulation, and visualization, into a unified problem solving environment. It sounds like your application may fit quite naturally into this framework!

Regarding plasma physics, we actually have an ongoing project callled National Fusion Collaboration (http://www.osti.gov/scidac/updatesschissel.html), which is funded through our Department of Energy's SciDAC program. To see some example images showing how SCIRun is being used for visualization in this project, please either visit http://www.sci.utah.edu/research/fusion.html, or go to the SCI Image gallery (http://www.sci.utah.edu/cgi-bin/sci_gallery.pl), and enter "NIMROD" in the Search entry.

* Do you know of efforts to use scirun to solve similar simulation problems like ours? If there are none, do you think it is feasible to create modules or in any other way to expand scirun so that it can integrate with our code -- it is in Fortran90 -- so that we have a smooth problem solving environment?

Yes, we have had considerable success in wrapping up third-party codes as SCIRun modules. A lot of it depends on the specifics of your code -- how modular it is, what granularity you want for modules, and how you want to deal with passing data around.

* How does scirun work on dual processor machines? Can scirun work in parallel, in a cluster enviroment, specially the visualisation modules?

SCIRun works great on dual processor machines (shared memory), but we do not yet have a cluster (distributed memory) implementation.

* We will upgrade to G5s in the next few months (probably until Summer). I noticed that "SCIRun has not been tested on G5". However, do you expect the port to be problematic? Have you had any reports of people trying to use scigrid on a G5?

We have just begun investigating this, and one of my colleagues tells me it now works. We will definitely make G5's one of the targeted platforms for our next release (probably in May).

Cheers,
Dave



On Mar 21, 2004, at 12:12 PM, Paulo Tribolet Abreu wrote:

Hi:

I work in GoLP, a research group in plasma physics:
http://cfp.ist.utl.pt/golp/epp/epp.html

We have 40CPU G4 cluster with 22.6GB RAM where most of the time we run massivelly parallel simulations of high intensity laser-plasma interactions using these two codes: osiris.framework and dcomet. You can read a short introduction to osiris here:
http://cfp.ist.utl.pt/golp/epp/osiris/intro/index.html

We are very interested in having a good visualization process integrated in our simulations. While doing some research on the internet about this subject, I found scirun. I noticed it is specially for medical visualization. However, the general introduction (chapters 2.1 and 2.2 of the user manual) shows that the original motivation of scirun is just what we are looking for: to create a single, unified, extensible problem solving environment.

So, I really have some general questions:

* Do you know of efforts to use scirun to solve similar simulation problems like ours? If there are none, do you think it is feasible to create modules or in any other way to expand scirun so that it can integrate with our code -- it is in Fortran90 -- so that we have a smooth problem solving environment?

* How does scirun work on dual processor machines? Can scirun work in parallel, in a cluster enviroment, specially the visualisation modules?

* We will upgrade to G5s in the next few months (probably until Summer). I noticed that "SCIRun has not been tested on G5". However, do you expect the port to be problematic? Have you had any reports of people trying to use scigrid on a G5?

Thanks (and now I'll go back to chapter 4 of the tutorial (-: )

Paulo

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