Advanced visualization support

Requesting support | Starting visualization applications

Researchers who need help visualizing data to demonstrate the results of their scientific computing can request expert assistance and collaboration from CISL. This service is available to researchers who want help using specialized applications on data analysis and visualization resources that CISL manages.

Visualization of an asteroid ocean impact.

The Deep Water Impact Ensemble Data Set was generated from large simulations of asteroids crashing into the ocean. These simulations were run using various sizes of asteroids and angles of entry in order to study the aftermath of the impacts. Image from the CISL Visualization Gallery.

CISL visualization staff have particular expertise in CISL-developed software such as VAPOR and NCL but are open to assisting with other applications. They have helped science teams produce numerous visualizations for conferences, publications, and scientific journals as well as science and broadcast news programs.

See these sites for some examples:

Requesting support

To ask for assistance, please use this request form. Indicate clearly that the request is for "Advanced Visualization Support" and describe how the proposed visualization project meets the following criteria:

  • The assistance will culminate in a visualization deliverable or deliverables within a defined time period.
  • The deliverable(s) will help demonstrate science results and findings.
  • A member or members of the science team will participate actively in the production of the deliverable(s).
  • Data to be visualized must have been generated on a CISL high-performance computing system.
  • CISL data analysis and visualization resources will be used in creating the deliverables.

Requests for advanced visualization support are evaluated based on those criteria to ensure the most productive use of the limited available staff time. To further help us evaluate your request, please briefly address the following questions when submitting the request form:

  1. What does the scientist want to communicate about the data with a visualization?
  2. What type of visualization is needed (2D or 3D animation, still images)?
  3. What model or instrument produced the data?
  4. How big are the data?
  5. In what file format are the data stored?

The CISL visualization staff will follow up with requesters directly if additional details are needed.

Starting visualization applications

CISL visualization experts can help as described above with using applications such as NCL and VAPOR.

See the Casper documentation to learn how to submit the necessary jobs and start the applications on that data analysis and visualization cluster.