SeedMe preview: your results from disk to device

Abstract

Computational simulations have become an indispensible tool for a wide variety of science and engineering investigations. With the rise in complexity and size of computational simulations, it has become necessary to continually and rapidly assess simulation output. Visualization could play an even more important and critical role for qualitative assessment of raw data. The result of many visualization processes is a set of image sequences, which can be encoded as a movie and distributed within and beyond the research group. The movie encoding process is a computationally intensive, manual, serial, cumbersome and complicated process as well as one that each research group must undertake. Furthermore, sharing visualizations within and outside the research groups requires additional effort. On the other hand, the ubiquity of portable wireless devices has made it possible and oftentimes desirable to access information anywhere and at anytime, yet the application of this capability for use in computational research and outreach has been negligible. We are building a cyberinfrastructure SeedMe (Stream Encode Explore Disseminate My Experiments) to fill these gaps that will enable seamless sharing and streaming of visualization content on a variety of platforms from mobile devices to workstations making it possible to conveniently view and assess the results thus provide an essential yet missing component in computational research and current High Performance Computing infrastructure.