Climate Data Analysis Project Team Receives Award and Releases Version 2.1.0
Ultrascale Visualization Project Granted FLC 2015 Interagency Partnership Award
The development team for the project “Ultrascale Visualization Climate Data Analysis Tools (UV-CDAT)” was recently selected as the 2015 recipient of the National Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer’s (FLC) Interagency Partnership Award. The selection came shortly after the release of UV-CDAT version 2.1.0.
According to the FLC’s website, the award “recognizes the efforts of laboratory employees from at least two different agencies who have collaboratively accomplished outstanding work in the process of transferring a technology.” Started in 1974, the FLC assists the U.S. public and private sectors in utilizing technologies developed by federal government research laboratories and is comprised of more than 250 federal government labs and research centers. The team will receive the award-one of the consortium’s highest honors-at the 2015 National FLC Awards ceremony, which will take place on April 29, 2015, in Denver, Colorado.
UV-CDAT is a collaboration between government, academic, and private sector organizations including: Kitware, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Earth System Research Laboratory, New York University, University of Utah, and Tech-X Corporation. For the project, the team has developed a novel system that enables climate researchers to solve their most complex data analysis and visualization challenges. Version 2.1.0 (v2.1) of UV-CDAT, which was released in January 2015, includes new atmosphere, land, and ocean diagnostics, as well as changes regarding visualization, cdms2/regrid, and cdutil/genutil.
“We are grateful to be a part of such an extensive collaboration,” Aashish Chaudhary, Kitware’s Principal Investigator for the project and Technical Leader, said. “The work developed through this effort will greatly advance the study of climate science.”
UV-CDAT is the first system successfully designed to run unrelated analysis and visualization tools and techniques, while capturing independent workflows and provenance for enhancing reproducibility and repeatability. The system-which is highly collaborative, extensible, and customizable-offers unparalleled capabilities for climate scientists in handling big data analytics, sensitivity analyses, heterogeneous data sources, and multiple disciplinary domains. Such capabilities include parallelism for better efficiency, higher speed, and more accurate scientific inferences.
“As climate science continues to evolve and the complexity of data sets increases, it is vital that we increase our visualization and analysis capabilities,” Chaudhary said. “The system developed for UV-CDAT will not only help scientists to better comprehend climate science, but it will also help them to understand how climate change affects us all.”
The Interagency Partnership Award is not the first received by the team for UV-CDAT. In 2014, the project received an Outstanding Partnership award from the FLC Far West Region. The award was one of 16 presented at the Joint FLC Far West / Mid-Continent Regional Meeting.
In addition, Chaudhary received an award for the success of UV-CDAT at the 4th Annual Earth System Grid Federation and Ultrascale Visualization Climate Data Analysis Tools Face-To-Face Conference, which was held in Livermore, California, on December 9-11, 2014. Chaudhary was recognized for his contributions to the building, installation, and testing of the UV-CDAT overall product, which, according to the conference report, “went above and beyond expectations.” As the report notes, Chaudhary’s “implementation and utilization of Kitware projects such as CMake, CTest, CDash, and VTK and his leadership contributed to the successful release of UV-CDAT 2.0 for the community.”
“Using open-source technology provides many advantages,” Chaudhary said. “It promotes collaboration between organizations, while encouraging participation from the greater scientific community. This allows for innovation and development to be faster and more responsive.”
This material is based upon work supported by the Department of Energy under Award Number DE-SC0005486.
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