ESGF Face-2-Face Conference Discusses Climate Visualization

Last month, I attended the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) Face to Face (F2F) conference organized by Dean Williams from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Kitware is one of the major contributors to the Ultrascale Visualization Climate Data Analysis Toolkit (UV-CDAT) under the ESGF umbrella and has been leading the software process and visualization efforts on the project.

ESGF F2F 2015 was held at the Marriott Hotel in the seaside town of Monterey, California. This year, the conference focused on getting the various ESGF data centers across the United States up and running with the latest code base. Among the attendees were climate researchers from all around the world including Europe, Australia, and China. Various national organizations were also represented at the conference, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

UV-CDAT poster presented at the ESGF Face-2-Face 2015 conference

I, along with Charles Doutriaux from LLNL, presented a poster on UV-CDAT at the conference. UV-CDAT is heavily used across ESGF. It uses the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) as the graphics backend. The poster highlighted extensive climate visualization capabilities.

In addition, Matthew Harris from LLNL presented a poster on CDATWeb, which provides climate Web informatics based on the UV-CDAT backend. CDATWeb is developed by Kitware in collaboration with LLNL.

CDATWeb poster presented at the ESGF Face-2-Face 2015 conference

Other notable presentations at the conference regarded topics including European Network for Earth System Modeling (ENES) by Sebastien Denvil; Collaborative REAnalysis Technical Environment Intercomparison (CREATE-IP) by Jerry Potter from the University of California (UC), Davis; ViSUS, an on-demand streaming framework for massive climate simulation ensembles, by Cameron Christensen of The University of Utah; and Named Data Networking (NDN) by Christos Papadopoulos from Colorado State University.

Kitware's presence at the conference was important in gaining feedback on the various ESGF projects to which we contribute and in helping to further discussions. All in all, it was a pleasure meeting folks face to face and getting a feel for Kitware's impact on the climate modeling and research community.

Acknowledgement: 

The work is performed under DOE Grant as part of the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME). We are very thankful to the DOE Earth System Modeling group, ACME workflow team and Lead Dean Williams, and all of our ACME collaborators from LLNL, LANL, SNL, ANL, and LBNL.