sure is. I do it almost every day. A paper that discusses some of the ideas is at http://www.research.ibm.com/weather/vis/vis_design.htm or http://www.research.ibm.com/weather/vis/w_vis.pdf. Typical static results are viewable at http://www.research.ibm.com/weather/NY/NY.html
One thing that you need to determine is how tightly coupled you want the simulation and visualization. In my case, we are generating files from the model in a specific format to drive a particular type of visualization suited toward qualitative assessment (e.g., browsing), feature detection, etc. The idea is to quickly detect problems in the run or provide a heads up for post-processing analysis. The files containing multiple variables are flat binary, one set per time step. (There's more than one per time step because the model is nested on a multigrid). I have a set of filter programs (shell scripts and C programs) invoked as ! filters in general array Import (and playing with caching) to assess the status of the model run, what's been computed, calculate statistics on what's been completed, read the data, etc. All of this is under the covers of an application, where the user just selects which model run is of interest. The simulation is running on an SP with shared filesystems with workstations (AIX, NT, Linux) on 100Mb or gigabit ethernet. This approach allows a user to also work with runs already completed and resident on disk with the same application. I also use multiple instances of the same application in script mode running independently on SMP nodes of the SP to generate fixed products in parallel such as those on the sample web site. If you want something more tightly coupled, then you could have the simulation initiated from DX (e.g., ! filter), have the simulation invoke DX (e.g., via dxlink) or set up more peer-to-peer communication. -------------------------- Lloyd A. Treinish Deep Computing Institute IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center P. O. Box 218 Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 914-945-2770 (voice) 914-945-3434 (facsimile) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.research.ibm.com/people/l/lloydt/ http://www.research.ibm.com/weather "Frederick R. Phelan Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>@opendx.watson.ibm.com on 03/20/2001 10:05:46 AM Please respond to [email protected] Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [email protected] cc: Subject: [opendx-users] Simultaneously Run Simulation and View Results in DX. How? Is there any way to simultaneously run a simulation and view the results in dx as the numbers are being crunched? The simulation is a transient fluid flow program, in which results are continually being calculated at new time steps. Probably we would probably want to update the "live" picture, every 100 time steps or so. Thanks for any tips. Fred Phelan Frederick R. Phelan Jr., Ph.D. Multiphase Materials Group Polymers Division National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST, Bldg. 224/Rm. B108 100 Bureau Dr., STOP 8543 Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8543 301.975.6761 (VOX) 301.975.4932 (FAX) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nist.gov/frederick_phelan
