eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/content/en_article1.php - gerrit/www.eclipse.org/community - Git at Google

 <?php
 /*******************************************************************************
  * Copyright (c) 2015 Eclipse Foundation and others.
  * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
  * are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
  * which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
  * http://eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
  *
  * Contributors:
  *    Eric Poirier (Eclipse Foundation) - Initial implementation
  *******************************************************************************/
 ?>

 <h1 class="article-title"><?php echo $pageTitle; ?></h1>


     <h2>Science Highlight</h2>
     <p>
       <i>Jay Jay Billings, Alexander J. McCaskey, Andrew Bennett, Jordan
         H. Deyton, Hari Krishnan, Taylor Patterson, Anna Wojtowicz</i>
     </p>

     <h3>Introduction</h3>

     <p>Scientific Computing can be roughly divided into several
       different areas, one of which is that of Modeling and Simulation
       (M&amp;S). Modeling and Simulation is a field that has existed, from a
       computing perspective, since World War II and finds its roots in
       government laboratories and academia. It is a field that
       encompasses both the art and the science of encoding the physical
       world into computers.</p>

     <p>The subjects that have been investigated with computers are
       innumerable, with today’s largest supercomputers simulating
       everything from cutting edge climate science to the behavior of
       matter at nanoscale resolution. However, while the subjects have
       changed and grown over the decades, many of the tools and the
       behaviors of the M&amp;S community have not. A very large number of
       the most advanced computational studies of the physical world are
       done with tools that would be recognizable by a programmer from
       the late 1970s. The sophistication and the capability of today’s
       software are much greater, but the tools - compilers, editors,
       third-party libraries, etc. - are not that different. That is to
       say that, on the whole, computational scientists are a
       command-line editing, low-level code loving kind of crowd!</p>

     <p>
       <a
         href="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/visualization_tools.png"><img
         src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/visualization_tools.png"
         width="500" alt="" /></a><br> <i>Fig. 1 A collage of different
         visualazations tools in ICE. Clockwise from upper left: a
         nuclear fuel assembly, phonon data from nuclear scattering
         experiments, a model of nuclear plant, and a model of battery.</i>
     </p>

     <p>
       The Eclipse Platform has been adopted in many different fields
       and, in some cases, revolutionized the state of the art. Eclipse
       is not used in modeling and simulation as much as it is in other
       areas, but it is widely known. Several years ago we asked the
       question, “What if the tools in Eclipse that are used for <i>authoring
         scientific software</i> could be repurposed for <i>using
         scientific software</i>?” The result is the Eclipse Integrated
       Computational Environment (ICE); a general purpose, easily
       extended M&amp;S platform that significantly updates the way
       computational scientists interact with their software. It improves
       productivity and streamlines the workflow for computational
       scientists when they need to create input files, launch jobs on
       local or remote machines, and process output. Since it is based on
       the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, developers can update it to
       support new codes or add new tools just as easily as users can
       perform simulations of nuclear fuels or visualize neutron
       scattering data.
     </p>

     <h3>Design and Implementation</h3>
     <p>
       ICE is designed around the idea that each task performed by a
       computational scientist - creating an input file, launching a job,
       post-processing data, etc. - can be done equally as well by an
       intelligent delegate that has the required data and knows the
       instructions necessary to perform the task. This seems broad, and
       it certainly is, but it works very well for the common tasks
       associated with M&amp;S. For example, writing an input file is more
       about knowing <i>what</i> information should go in the file than <i>how</i>
       it should be written. Likewise, launching a massively parallel job
       is more about knowing <i>what</i> should be launched than the
       details of <i>how</i> to execute it. Each “intelligent delegate”
       in ICE is an Eclipse Plugin that inherits from an <i>Item</i> base
       class and provides a normal, pluggable OSGi service. In the ICE
       parlance, plugin and Item are used interchangeably most of the
       time.
     </p>

     <p>ICE also includes some tools that are just, simply, tools and not
       part of the normal task-based design. Each case is directly
       related to manipulating or generating data, not using it, so some
       commonality does exist. These include tools, for example, for 3D
       visualization and editing ICE’s materials database. Even though
       these tools are, in a sense, standalone tools, they are still
       integrated with the platform as OSGi services and used by the
       Items.</p>

     <p>The entire platform is Eclipse-based with a small amount of C++
       code for external I/O and real-time monitoring services for
       simulation codes. ICE does not use the C++ code itself; it is just
       provided to make it easier for the heavily C/C++ and Fortran based
       M&amp;S community to communicate with ICE.</p>

     <h3>Examples: Nuclear Plant Simulations and 3D Visualization</h3>
     <p>ICE’s primary purpose it to make it easy to perform complicated
       M&amp;S tasks. It has successfully integrated tools and simulation
       suites from across the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) complex
       into a single, unified, cross-platform workbench for both
       “hard-core” computational scientists and those with limited
       experience. Hopefully, the following two examples, one each for
       visualization and input generation, will illustrate that.</p>

     <p>The first example is visualization. 3D visualization is a
       critical, and arguably under utilized, tool in scientific
       computing. ICE provides tools that allow users to visualize their
       data using some of the most advanced visualization capabilities
       available, namely those of the VisIt suite. Users can perform
       custom analysis operations, such as slicing, via a built-in
       visualization console and other widgets. The view is completely
       interactive with rotation and zooming just a click away.</p>

     <a
       href="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/awesome_visit_python.png"><img
       style="margin-left: 1em;"
       src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/awesome_visit_python.png"
       width="350" alt="" /></a><a
       href="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/VisItICE.png"><img
       style="margin-left: 1em;"
       src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/VisItICE.png"
       width="350" alt="" /></a>
     <br>
     <p>
       <i>Fig. 2 a) The power profile from a neutronics simulation in a
         sodium cooled fast reactor and b) the temerature profile of a
         simulated cylindrical cell battery, vizualized in ICE.</i>
     </p>
     <p>Both of the images in Fig. 2. are from actual simulations and
       visualized in ICE. ICE’s tools can connect to a local or remote
       running installation of VisIt, the latter making it possible to
       render very large visualization since VisIt has successfully
       rendered results from simulations with trillions of elements.
       Users can also connect to visualizations created by other users to
       share their their results or display interesting properties in the
       output. VisIt is one of a few different visualizations supported
       by the platform, all of which can be or will soon be accessible
       via OSGi services.</p>

     <p>The second example is input generation. Input generation is one
       of the most difficult areas of M&amp;S because dealing with the
       complex physics and complicated input formats are challenging at
       best. The challenge increases as the domain complexity increases,
       and one good example is the area of balance-of-plant or
       plant-level simulations for nuclear reactors. ICE has plugins for
       generating input for these simulations with the RELAP-7 simulator,
       based on MOOSE from Idaho National Laboratory, as well as
       launching RELAP-7 and viewing its results. Since the whole goal is
       to make everything very easy and push the state of the art, ICE
       takes this a step further by providing plant-level visualizations
       of the input.</p>

     <p>
       <a
         href="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/newfeatures.png"><img
         style="margin-left: 1em;"
         src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/newfeatures.png"
         width="600" alt="" /></a><br> <i>Fig. 3 A plant-level view of a cooling
         loop in a nuclear reactor, as shown in ICE for RELAP-7.</i>
     </p>

     <p>In both cases, care has been taken to make it possible to reuse
       the new workbench extensions in other parts of the platform so
       that future releases will see embedded 3D visualizations in
       Eclipse Forms and plant-level views that are updated with
       simulation results in real-time, for example.</p>

     <h3>Availability and Contributions</h3>

     <p>
       Eclipse ICE is an Eclipse Technology project and the source code
       is available at <a target="_blank"
         href="https://github.com/eclipse/ice">https://github.com/eclipse/ice</a>.
       The project is currently under active development by the Eclipse
       ICE team and review by the Eclipse IP team with the hope of
       joining a simultaneous release as soon as possible. Documentation
       on the project is available at <a
         href="http://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.ice">http://www.eclipse.org/ice</a>
       and <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/Ice">http://wiki.eclipse.org/ice</a>.
       Not all of the information about ICE is available on these pages
       since its initial contribution was only a few months back, but it
       is being migrated quickly.
     </p>

     <p>
       The Eclipse ICE team welcomes contributions in any form from the
       community, (so long as they follow the Eclipse Contribution
       process, if it applies). The team hopes to double the number of
       core contributors and core contributing institutions in the next
       calendar year, so anyone with a good idea should speak up in the
       forums or on the Eclipse ICE users list, <a
         href="mailto:ice-users@eclipse.org">ice-users@eclipse.org</a>.
       Ultimately only a large, strong community of collaborating experts
       can bring a revolution to the way we use our scientific software!
     </p>

     <h3>Acknowledgements</h3>

     <p>We gratefully acknowledge the support of our sponsors in the U.S.
       Deparment of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy, Advanced Modeling
       and Simulation (NEAMS); the Department of Energy, Office of Energy
       Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Computer-Aided Engineering for
       Batteries (CAEBAT) project; the Consortium for Advanced Simulation
       of Light Water Reactors (CASL); and the Oak Ridge National
       Laboratory Director's Research and Development Fund.</p>

 <div class="bottomitem">
   <h3>About the Authors</h3>

   <div class="row">
     <div class="col-sm-12">
       <div class="row">
         <div class="col-sm-8">
           <img class="author-picture"
         src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/jayjay.jpg"
         width="90" alt="jay billings" />
         </div>
         <div class="col-sm-16">
           <p class="author-name">
         Jay Jay Billings<br />
         <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ornl.gov/">Oak Ridge
           National Laboratory</a>
       </p>
       <ul class="author-link">
         <!--<li><a target="_blank" href="">Blog</a></li>-->
         <li><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/jayjaybillings">Twitter</a></li>
         <!--<li><a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/pub/max-rydahl-andersen">Lindedin</a></li>
         $og-->
       </ul>
         </div>
       </div>
     </div>
   </div>
 </div>
	<?php
	/*******************************************************************************
	* Copyright (c) 2015 Eclipse Foundation and others.
	* All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
	* are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
	* which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
	* http://eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
	*
	* Contributors:
	* Eric Poirier (Eclipse Foundation) - Initial implementation
	*******************************************************************************/
	?>

	<h1 class="article-title"><?php echo $pageTitle; ?></h1>


	<h2>Science Highlight</h2>
	<p>
	<i>Jay Jay Billings, Alexander J. McCaskey, Andrew Bennett, Jordan
	H. Deyton, Hari Krishnan, Taylor Patterson, Anna Wojtowicz</i>
	</p>

	<h3>Introduction</h3>

	<p>Scientific Computing can be roughly divided into several
	different areas, one of which is that of Modeling and Simulation
	(M&S). Modeling and Simulation is a field that has existed, from a
	computing perspective, since World War II and finds its roots in
	government laboratories and academia. It is a field that
	encompasses both the art and the science of encoding the physical
	world into computers.</p>

	<p>The subjects that have been investigated with computers are
	innumerable, with today’s largest supercomputers simulating
	everything from cutting edge climate science to the behavior of
	matter at nanoscale resolution. However, while the subjects have
	changed and grown over the decades, many of the tools and the
	behaviors of the M&S community have not. A very large number of
	the most advanced computational studies of the physical world are
	done with tools that would be recognizable by a programmer from
	the late 1970s. The sophistication and the capability of today’s
	software are much greater, but the tools - compilers, editors,
	third-party libraries, etc. - are not that different. That is to
	say that, on the whole, computational scientists are a
	command-line editing, low-level code loving kind of crowd!</p>

	<p>
	<a
	href="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/visualization_tools.png"><img
	src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/visualization_tools.png"
	width="500" alt="" /></a><br> <i>Fig. 1 A collage of different
	visualazations tools in ICE. Clockwise from upper left: a
	nuclear fuel assembly, phonon data from nuclear scattering
	experiments, a model of nuclear plant, and a model of battery.</i>
	</p>

	<p>
	The Eclipse Platform has been adopted in many different fields
	and, in some cases, revolutionized the state of the art. Eclipse
	is not used in modeling and simulation as much as it is in other
	areas, but it is widely known. Several years ago we asked the
	question, “What if the tools in Eclipse that are used for <i>authoring
	scientific software</i> could be repurposed for <i>using
	scientific software</i>?” The result is the Eclipse Integrated
	Computational Environment (ICE); a general purpose, easily
	extended M&S platform that significantly updates the way
	computational scientists interact with their software. It improves
	productivity and streamlines the workflow for computational
	scientists when they need to create input files, launch jobs on
	local or remote machines, and process output. Since it is based on
	the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, developers can update it to
	support new codes or add new tools just as easily as users can
	perform simulations of nuclear fuels or visualize neutron
	scattering data.
	</p>

	<h3>Design and Implementation</h3>
	<p>
	ICE is designed around the idea that each task performed by a
	computational scientist - creating an input file, launching a job,
	post-processing data, etc. - can be done equally as well by an
	intelligent delegate that has the required data and knows the
	instructions necessary to perform the task. This seems broad, and
	it certainly is, but it works very well for the common tasks
	associated with M&S. For example, writing an input file is more
	about knowing <i>what</i> information should go in the file than <i>how</i>
	it should be written. Likewise, launching a massively parallel job
	is more about knowing <i>what</i> should be launched than the
	details of <i>how</i> to execute it. Each “intelligent delegate”
	in ICE is an Eclipse Plugin that inherits from an <i>Item</i> base
	class and provides a normal, pluggable OSGi service. In the ICE
	parlance, plugin and Item are used interchangeably most of the
	time.
	</p>

	<p>ICE also includes some tools that are just, simply, tools and not
	part of the normal task-based design. Each case is directly
	related to manipulating or generating data, not using it, so some
	commonality does exist. These include tools, for example, for 3D
	visualization and editing ICE’s materials database. Even though
	these tools are, in a sense, standalone tools, they are still
	integrated with the platform as OSGi services and used by the
	Items.</p>

	<p>The entire platform is Eclipse-based with a small amount of C++
	code for external I/O and real-time monitoring services for
	simulation codes. ICE does not use the C++ code itself; it is just
	provided to make it easier for the heavily C/C++ and Fortran based
	M&S community to communicate with ICE.</p>

	<h3>Examples: Nuclear Plant Simulations and 3D Visualization</h3>
	<p>ICE’s primary purpose it to make it easy to perform complicated
	M&S tasks. It has successfully integrated tools and simulation
	suites from across the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) complex
	into a single, unified, cross-platform workbench for both
	“hard-core” computational scientists and those with limited
	experience. Hopefully, the following two examples, one each for
	visualization and input generation, will illustrate that.</p>

	<p>The first example is visualization. 3D visualization is a
	critical, and arguably under utilized, tool in scientific
	computing. ICE provides tools that allow users to visualize their
	data using some of the most advanced visualization capabilities
	available, namely those of the VisIt suite. Users can perform
	custom analysis operations, such as slicing, via a built-in
	visualization console and other widgets. The view is completely
	interactive with rotation and zooming just a click away.</p>

	<a
	href="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/awesome_visit_python.png"><img
	style="margin-left: 1em;"
	src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/awesome_visit_python.png"
	width="350" alt="" /></a><a
	href="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/VisItICE.png"><img
	style="margin-left: 1em;"
	src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/VisItICE.png"
	width="350" alt="" /></a>
	<br>
	<p>
	<i>Fig. 2 a) The power profile from a neutronics simulation in a
	sodium cooled fast reactor and b) the temerature profile of a
	simulated cylindrical cell battery, vizualized in ICE.</i>
	</p>
	<p>Both of the images in Fig. 2. are from actual simulations and
	visualized in ICE. ICE’s tools can connect to a local or remote
	running installation of VisIt, the latter making it possible to
	render very large visualization since VisIt has successfully
	rendered results from simulations with trillions of elements.
	Users can also connect to visualizations created by other users to
	share their their results or display interesting properties in the
	output. VisIt is one of a few different visualizations supported
	by the platform, all of which can be or will soon be accessible
	via OSGi services.</p>

	<p>The second example is input generation. Input generation is one
	of the most difficult areas of M&S because dealing with the
	complex physics and complicated input formats are challenging at
	best. The challenge increases as the domain complexity increases,
	and one good example is the area of balance-of-plant or
	plant-level simulations for nuclear reactors. ICE has plugins for
	generating input for these simulations with the RELAP-7 simulator,
	based on MOOSE from Idaho National Laboratory, as well as
	launching RELAP-7 and viewing its results. Since the whole goal is
	to make everything very easy and push the state of the art, ICE
	takes this a step further by providing plant-level visualizations
	of the input.</p>

	<p>
	<a
	href="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/newfeatures.png"><img
	style="margin-left: 1em;"
	src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/newfeatures.png"
	width="600" alt="" /></a><br> <i>Fig. 3 A plant-level view of a cooling
	loop in a nuclear reactor, as shown in ICE for RELAP-7.</i>
	</p>

	<p>In both cases, care has been taken to make it possible to reuse
	the new workbench extensions in other parts of the platform so
	that future releases will see embedded 3D visualizations in
	Eclipse Forms and plant-level views that are updated with
	simulation results in real-time, for example.</p>

	<h3>Availability and Contributions</h3>

	<p>
	Eclipse ICE is an Eclipse Technology project and the source code
	is available at <a target="_blank"
	href="https://github.com/eclipse/ice">https://github.com/eclipse/ice</a>.
	The project is currently under active development by the Eclipse
	ICE team and review by the Eclipse IP team with the hope of
	joining a simultaneous release as soon as possible. Documentation
	on the project is available at <a
	href="http://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.ice">http://www.eclipse.org/ice</a>
	and <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/Ice">http://wiki.eclipse.org/ice</a>.
	Not all of the information about ICE is available on these pages
	since its initial contribution was only a few months back, but it
	is being migrated quickly.
	</p>

	<p>
	The Eclipse ICE team welcomes contributions in any form from the
	community, (so long as they follow the Eclipse Contribution
	process, if it applies). The team hopes to double the number of
	core contributors and core contributing institutions in the next
	calendar year, so anyone with a good idea should speak up in the
	forums or on the Eclipse ICE users list, <a
	href="mailto:ice-users@eclipse.org">ice-users@eclipse.org</a>.
	Ultimately only a large, strong community of collaborating experts
	can bring a revolution to the way we use our scientific software!
	</p>

	<h3>Acknowledgements</h3>

	<p>We gratefully acknowledge the support of our sponsors in the U.S.
	Deparment of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy, Advanced Modeling
	and Simulation (NEAMS); the Department of Energy, Office of Energy
	Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Computer-Aided Engineering for
	Batteries (CAEBAT) project; the Consortium for Advanced Simulation
	of Light Water Reactors (CASL); and the Oak Ridge National
	Laboratory Director's Research and Development Fund.</p>

	<div class="bottomitem">
	<h3>About the Authors</h3>

	<div class="row">
	<div class="col-sm-12">
	<div class="row">
	<div class="col-sm-8">
	<img class="author-picture"
	src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2015/january/images/jayjay.jpg"
	width="90" alt="jay billings" />
	</div>
	<div class="col-sm-16">
	<p class="author-name">
	Jay Jay Billings<br />
	<a target="_blank" href="http://www.ornl.gov/">Oak Ridge
	National Laboratory</a>
	</p>
	<ul class="author-link">
	<!--<li><a target="_blank" href="">Blog</a></li>-->
	<li><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/jayjaybillings">Twitter</a></li>
	<!--<li><a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/pub/max-rydahl-andersen">Lindedin</a></li>
	$og-->
	</ul>
	</div>
	</div>
	</div>
	</div>
	</div>