2015 Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) Summer School
SUPERCOMPUTING FOR EVERYONE SERIES: PERFORMANCE TUNING SUMMER SCHOOL (August 17 - 21, 2015)
From a user perspective, supercomputers are more complicated to program and handle than an ordinary desktop workstation. Unfortunately, this leads to parallel programs that do no necessarily satisfy the performance expectations of the users. Such unexpected performance results can have many reasons. Basic knowledge of performance modeling, prediction and verification, as taught in this summer school, will teach users skills to formulate and verify their performance expectations.
For detailed information on this course, please see: Supercomputing for Everyone and Indiana University .
To register, please visit XSEDE registration - Performance Tuning
Local event is taking place at the INSCC Auditorium (Rm 110) from 9am to 3pm local (MST) time.
SCIENCE VISUALIZATION (August 24 - 25, 2015)
This two-day training course will introduce students to data visualization with a
primary focus on visualization of large volumetric data resulting from simulation
and instrumentation. We begin with an overview of visualization as a whole, beginning
with a simple
taxonomy: illustration, which uses techniques of computer graphics and animation to
convey concepts, and data-driven visualization which interpret data as imagery to
convey the content of the data Data-driven visualization is further divided into
two broad areas.
Information visualization is concerned with visualizing discrete data such as is often
found in Excel spreadsheets and relational databases - think a sales database, including
a record for many customer transactions including date, product list and so forth.
Scientific data is concerned with continuous data defined over a domain - think
weather data, representing variables like temperature and pressure in a three-dimensional
region of the atmosphere. This section will include copious examples of each class
of visualization. The next section provides a brief introduction to scientific illustration,
in which a specialist will provide a hands on demonstration of an interactive tool
for modeling, animating and rendering visualizations. Either Blender or Maya will
be demonstrated. This section is intended to give students a broad overview of the
capabilities of these systems and to enable them to identify situations in which these
are the appropriate tools.
Following will be an introduction to information visualization. We begin with an
brief history of info viz, then discuss data and techniques and an overview of the
software tools available. Following this will be a demonstration of a commercial
end-user application (Tableau).
We then segue to scientific visualization, the focus of the course. In an introductory
section we will present an overview of scientific data. We begin with a conceptual
approach to scientific data as functions over a time/space domain, then discuss how
this data is represented as time/space grids with variables associated with grid points
and cells. We discuss how visualization systems transform such data to imagery.
We then present hands-on demonstrations of open-source general-purpose tools for scientific
visualization - ParaView and VisIt. Following demonstrations of the interactive
interface to each of these, we will discuss techniques in which scripting can be used
to generate visualizations off-line. We will then discuss issues that arise when
datasets become very large, discussing parallel execution of the tools, and data
layout for optimal I/O. This will include a presentation of the facilities we maintain
at the Texas Advanced Computing Center for high-performance visualization of very
large datasets and how we provide these services to remote users.
To register, please visit XSEDE registration - Science Visualization
Local event is taking place at the INSCC Auditorium (Rm 110) from 9am to 3pm local (MST) time.