CDUX personnel and alumni made five presentations at the Department of Energy Computer Graphics Forum (DOECGF), which was held virtually this week:

• Sam Schwartz presented "Machine Learning-Based Autotuning for Parallel Particle Advection," summarizing his results which will appear at EGPGV21 in June.
• Nicole Marsaglia presented "Help Me Graduate! -- A User Study on Camera Position Preference."
• James Kress presented some highlights from his Ph.D. dissertation in "Comparing Time-to-Solution for In Situ Visualization Paradigms at Scale."
• Samuel Li presented on some new work he has done since he graduated with "SPERR -- SPECK Encoding with Error Bounding."
• Matt Larsen presented on Ascent and Devil Ray as part of the CGF's "tools updates."

Finally, CDUX alum Samuel Li served as the Program Chair for the event.

Hank Childs led a tutorial today at the 2021 Exascale Computing Project Annual Meeting (ECPAM). This tutorial was based on successful tutorials offered at ECPAM19 and ECPAM20, although delivered virtually and shortened to 90 minutes. Once again, most of the time was spent presenting on Ascent, with materials from CDUX alum Matt Larsen and LLNL's Cyrus Harrison. Terry Turton and David Rogers of LANL delivered 25 minutes on Cinema, and Ken Moreland of SNL and Berk Geveci of Kitware gave short presentations on VTK-m and Catalyst, respectively.

Cyrus Harrison, Matt Larsen, and Hank Childs delivered a virtual tutorial on Ascent today. The tutorial was organized by the Exascale Computing Project, as one of the events they offer throughout the year for online learning. The tutorial is available on YouTube and its slides are available as well.

Hank Childs led a full-day tutorial at SC20 today, titled "In Situ Analysis and Visualization with SENSEI and Ascent." This tutorial repeated the successful tutorial by the same name and team from SC19. Once again, the tutorial provided attendees with VirtualBox images and Jupyter notebook environments so that they could run real-world examples with both SENSEI and Ascent. It also provided an overview of the Cinema. The tutorial had eight total presenters, drawn from their respective software teams.

The paper A Terminology for In Situ Visualization and Analysis Systems is now available online and will appear in the November 2020 edition of the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. This paper was a community effort to establish a terminology for in situ systems. Quoting the article:

"In situ processing, meaning visualizing or analyzing data as it is generated, is an alternative processing paradigm to post hoc. Historically, a number of terms have been used to describe in situ processing and its many variant strategies. However, the community has yet to agree on a consistent taxonomy. Notably, over the last decade, the term 'in situ' has been broadly used to 1) describe a specific strategy for processing data, and 2) as an umbrella term for the entire processing paradigm. This mixed use leads to confusion both for the visualization and analysis community and for its stakeholders."

The work also provides a taxonomy of in situ systems, and proposes terminology based on using the taxonomy. The paper had 57 co-authors, who met semi-regularly for several years (at conferences and via phone calls) to refine their ideas.

CDUX personnel and alumni made five presentations at the Department of Energy Computer Graphics Forum (DOECGF), which was held virtually this week:

• Matt Larsen made two presentations: "Interactive In Situ Visualization and Analysis Using Ascent and Jupyter" and "Devil Ray: A Portably Performant Ray Tracer for High-Order Element Visualization."
• Alister Maguire presented "Deep Learning Mesh Relaxation for Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian Simulations."
• James Kress presented "In-line vs. In-transit In Situ: Which Technique to Use at Scale?"
• Hank Childs presented an overview of activities at the University of Oregon.

Hank Childs has begun a term as an Associate Editor for the journal IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. His duties will include evaluating submissions by assigning them to reviewers, making a recommendation for publication or rejection based upon the referee reports, and helping solicit submissions to the journal.

Hank Childs led a tutorial today at the 2020 Exascale Computing Project Annual Meeting (ECPAM). This tutorial was based on the successful tutorial offered at ECPAM19. Once again, two thirds of the time was spent presenting on Ascent, with materials from CDUX alum Matt Larsen, Hank, and LLNL's Cyrus Harrison. The remainder of the time was spent describing algorithms being developed by in situ processing (Hank), VTK-m (Sandia's Ken Moreland), and Cinema (LANL's Terry Turton).

Hank Childs led a full-day tutorial at SC19 today, titled "In Situ Analysis and Visualization with SENSEI and Ascent." The tutorial provided attendees with VirtualBox images and Jupyter notebook environments so that they could run real-world examples with both SENSEI and Ascent. It also provided an overview of the Cinema and VTK-m projects, as well as covering recent results for in situ algorithms. The tutorial had eight total presenters, drawn from their respective software teams.

CDUX played a major role in delivering a half-day tutorial today on VTK-m at the IEEE Visualization conference in Vancouver. Hank Childs organized the tutorial, along with Ken Moreland of Sandia, David Pugmire of Oak Ridge, and Robert Maynard of Kitware. Further, CDUX Ph.D. students Abhishek Yenpure and Samuel Schwartz served as tutorial assistants, including preparing materials (slides, code examples, wiki pages, and virtual machine). The tutorial was well attended, with approximately 50 attendees throughout.

Hank Childs and CDUX alum Matt Larsen both presented today at the CEED Annual Meeting at the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, VA. CEED is an exascale co-design center focusing on delivering higher-order element technology to simulation codes, specifically those that are part of the Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project. Hank presented an overview of the ECP visualization strategy, including the VTK-m and Ascent projects, and Matt presented an overview of his DevilRay renderer for higher order elements.

CDUX team members Abhishek Yenpure and Hank Childs participated in the hackathon for the VTK-m project. The hackathon was a 2.5 day event, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Hank gave a tutorial to attendees on VTK-m, and also worked on extending VTK-m with mesh quality metrics. Abhishek focused on honing VTK-m's particle advection code, along with frequent CDUX collaborator Dave Pugmire.

Hank Childs was a co-organizer of a week-long Shonan Meeting on visualization software in Kanagawa, Japan. The seminar's other co-organizers were Takayuki Itoh, Michael Krone, and Guido Reina. The seminar's focus was on understanding the research challenges behind visualization software systems, as well as fostering closer connections between disparate development groups.

The Dagstuhl report was released today for the July 2018 seminar titled In Situ Visualization for Computational Science. Hank Childs was a co-organizer of the seminar, along with Janine Bennett, Christoph Garth, and Bernd Hentschel. The seminar was made up of participants with expertise in visualization, high-performance computing, and computational science.

Hank Childs led a tutorial at the Exascale Computing Project's Annual Meeting today. Two thirds of the time was spent presenting on Ascent, with materials from CDUX alum Matt Larsen, Hank, and LLNL's Cyrus Harrison. The remainder of the time was spent describing algorithms being developed by in situ processing (Hank), VTK-m (Sandia's Ken Moreland), and Cinema (LANL's David Rogers).

Hank Childs was a co-organizer of a week-long seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl on In Situ Visualization for Computational Science in Wadern, Germany. The seminar's other co-organizers were Janine Bennett, Christoph Garth, and Bernd Hentschel. The seminar's focus was on bringing together three communities: visualization experts, HPC experts, and computational scientists.

Roba Binyahib presented her recent research results at the Department of Energy Computer Graphics Forum (DOECGF) in Savannah, GA. She presented her work on parallel ray-casted volume rendering for unstructured meshes, which was recently accepted to the journal IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG).

Hank Childs presented a talk for OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) as part of their Science Pub series. With this series, a scientific expert presents a topic on to a general audience. Hank's talk was titled " Your Computer: Just How Powerful Is it, and Is That Enough?."

Hank Childs will serve as Program Co-Chair for the 18th EuroGraphics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, which will be co-located with EuroVis in Brno, Czech Republic in June 2018. Ph.D. student Kristi Belcher will serve as the Student Program Chair.

Hank Childs gave an invited presentation at the ISC High Performance Conference in Frankfurt, Germany today. The talk was part of a session on High Performance Visualization, organized by Chris Johnson of the University of Utah. The speakers were Hank, Chris, and Ingo Wald of Intel. Hank's presentation focused on in situ processing, including challenges with fitting within simulation code constraints and with efficient programming, and opportunities resulting from increased data access.

Hank Childs delivered the keynote presentation at the Software-Defined Visualization Workshop in Austin, TX. The event was hosted by TACC, and was part of a series of workshops known as IXPUG: the Intel Xeon Phi Users Group. Hank's talk was titled "State of the Art for In Situ Visualization."

The CDUX group hosted a 2.5 day code sprint for the VTK-m project. The event benefited many of our students, as their research often involves using VTK-m. Many prominent members from the project attended, including Ken Moreland of Sandia, Rob Maynard of Kitware, and Dave Pugmire of Oak Ridge, among others. Remote students James Kress and Stephanie Labasan also joined us for the event, along with alum Matt Larsen.

Hank Childs gave an invited presentation at the Smoky Mountains Conference (SMC16) in Gatlinburg, TN this week. The presentation focused on in situ processing, including challenges with efficient programming and opportunities resulting from increased data access. Hank also visited Oak Ridge Lab and UT-Knoxville to deliver invited talks and meet with collaborators. At ORNL, Hank met with Dave Pugmire and CDUX Ph.D. student James Kress, who has been doing his dissertation research at ORNL. At UTK, Hank met with Prof. Jian Huang and CDUX alum (and now UTK Ph.D. student) Kirsten Dawes.

Hank Childs delivered one of the keynote presentations at the ISC High Performance Workshop on In Situ Visualization in Frankfurt, Germany. The presentation was titled "In Situ Processing: Instantiations, Opportunities, and Challenges," and focused on work from the In Situ Terminology Project, Lagrangian flows, and performance modeling.

Hank Childs taught a 2-day short course for the Vlaams Supercomputer Centrum, a virtual center of five Flemish universities. The course, titled Visualization with VTK and VisIt, took place in Leuven, Belgium, on the KU Leuven campus.

CDUX participated in many activities at the SC15 conference:

• James Kress and Matt Larsen presented their research papers at the ISAV workshop.
• Kirsten Dawes, Hang Xu, Elliott Ewing, and Hank Childs all contributed to a demonstration of VisIt running on the Xeon Phi, along with Alok Hota and Jian Huang of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The demo was shown at Intel's HPC Developers Conference and at the UTK booth on the showroom floor.
• Samuel Li co-chaired a panel on student engagement in HPC.
• Hank Childs presented at four different venues:
  • "Optimizing VisIt for Next Generation Architectures" at Intel's HPC Developer's Conference, along with Jian Huang.
  • The tutorial "Effective HPC Visualization and Data Analysis using VisIt," along with Cyrus Harrison (organizer), David Pugmire, Rob Sisneros, and Amit Chourasia.
  • A lightning talk at ISAV on the need for standardizing in situ terms.
  • The Birds-of-a-Feather "Planning for Visualization on the Xeon Phi," along with Paul Navratil, Aaron Knoll, and Ingo Wald. Hank also organized this BOF.

Hank Childs gave an invited presentation at the International Computing for the Atmospheric Sciences Symposium (iCAS2015) in Annecy, France today. The presentation focused on exascale visualization issues, including upcoming drivers for in situ processing, and ideas for transforming and reducing data for later exploration, such as wavelet compression and Lagrangian particle tracers.

Four CDUX Ph.D. students (Brent Lessley, James Kress, Matt Larsen, and Ryan Bleile) attended the VTK-m code sprint in Livermore, CA, along with Hank Childs. Our students made up two thirds of all attending students, and they spent the two days interacting with leaders in the VTK-m project, including Ken Moreland, Rob Maynard, Jeremy Meredith, Chris Sewell, Berk Geveci, and others. The VTK-m project is an effort to update the popular VTK software for advanced architectures. CDUX has been one of the leading academic institutions in contributing code and conducting research in this new effort.

Hank Childs and Hamish Carr led a summer school on visualization in Warrington, England. The course was part of the Hartree Centre's Summer School series. The school consisted of five days of lectures and hands on exercises. Hank presented material for two of the five days, including exercises on parallel visualization. Other presenters were Robert Laramee of Swansea, David Pugmire of Oak Ridge, and Valerio Pascucci of the University of Utah.

Kristi Potter and her colleagues were notified that their workshop proposal at IEEE Visualization 2015 was accepted. The workshop is titled "Visualization for Decision Making Under Uncertainty" and will be held in October in Chicago, IL.

Hank Childs traveled to Singapore to deliver an invited presentation, titled "Data Exploration at the Exascale," at the Supercomputing Frontiers Conference. Hank also delivered a second talk, titled "Exascale Visualization: Why Portable Performance Will Change Visualization Software," on behalf of collaborator Ken Moreland of Sandia Lab.

Ryan Bleile, Kirsten Dawes, and students from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville pulled together a successful demo for the Intel booth at the ACM/IEEE SuperComputing (SC14) conference in New Orleans, LA. The demonstration highlighted recent successes from our team's Intel Parallel Computing Center. Specifically, the demo showed VisIt running on an Intel Xeon Phi, doing significant computation on the Phi, and rendering with Intel's SWR library on Xeon CPUs.

Hank Childs and Hamish Carr led a summer school on visualization for the Hartree Centre in Warrington, England. The school consisted of five days of lectures and hands on exercises. Hank presented material for two of the five days, including exercises on parallel visualization.

Hank Childs and Kristi Potter both participated in a week-long seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl on Scientific Visualization in Wadern, Germany. Hank presented on the topic of exascale visualization, and Kristi presented on uncertainty visualization.

Hank Childs taught a short course titled Visualization and Analysis of Very Large Data for the EU Regional School being held in Aachen, Germany. Hank also gave invited talks at RWTZ-Aachen and the Julich Supercomputing Centre (JSC).

Kristi Potter gave a colloquium talk at the School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Oregon State University on the visualization of statistical uncertainty. In addition to the talk, she also spent the day meeting with faculty and staff.

Hank Childs participated in a week-long seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl on Connecting Performance Analysis and Visualization to Advance Extreme Scale Computing in Wadern, Germany. Hank presented material on the lessons learned from scientific visualization, how these lessons might benefit performance visualization, and motivated the presentation by describing some of his experiences visualizing the performance of his own programs.

Hank Childs participated in the tutorial Effective HPC Visualization and Data Analysis using VisIt at the SC13 conference in Denver, CO. The tutorial was organized by Cyrus Harrison of Lawrence Livermore. This was the fourth tutorial on VisIt presented at the SC conference.

Hank Childs will serve as Papers Co-Chair for the 4th IEEE Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization, which will be co-located with IEEE Vis Week in Paris, France in November of 2014. Renato Pajarola and Venkat Vishwanath will also serve as Papers Co-Chairs.

Hank Childs organized and participated in a panel at the IEEE Visualization conference in Atlanta, GA. The panel, titled "Challenges for Scientific Visualization Software," focused on challenges such as programming models for future architectures, maximizing performance for future architectures, application architecture and data management, data models, and rendering. The panel was inspired by the paper Hank and others wrote for Computer Magazine in May of 2013.

James Kress was selected to be a member of the Graduate Student Advisory Board on campus. The mission of the board is to help the Graduate School create a supportive community for graduate students, provide workshops that enhance the quality of the graduate experience, and identify and share resources for professional development. This board consists of 25 members representing all of the schools on campus, of which he is one of only two from the STEM fields, and the only one for computer science. This will be a recurring position for the next five years.

Hank Childs delivered one of the keynote presentations at the 18th International Workshop on Vision, Modeling, and Visualization (VMV 2013), held in Lugano, Switzerland. The presentation was titled "Hybrid Parallelism For Visualization" and discussed Hank's recent research on the topic and its connection to exascale visualization.

Hank Childs served as the site chair for the Department of Energy Computer Graphics Forum. The meeting, which was attended by approximately thirty Department of Energy visualization experts, was held at the Benson Hotel in Portland, OR, and was organized by UO.

Hank Childs delivered an invited presentation at the KAUST Visualization Summit, held on the KAUST campus in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. Hank presented an overview of the challenges for exascale visualization.