Supporting Distributed Visualization Services for High Performance Science and Engineering Applications A Service Provider Perspective

The Science & Technology Facilities Council is home to international Facilities such as the ISIS Neutron Spallation Source ≪http://www.isis.rl.ac.uk≫, Central Laser Facility ≪http://www.clf.rl.ac.uk/≫ and Diamond Light Source ≪http://www.diamond.ac.uk/default.htm≫, the National Grid Service ≪http://www.grid-support.ac.uk/≫  including national super computers ≪http://www.cse.scitech.ac.uk≫, Tier1 data service for CERN particle physics experiment,  the British Atmospheric data Centre and the British Oceanographic Data Centre at the Space Science and Technology department.  Together these Facilities generate several Terabytes of data per month which needs to be handled, catalogued and provided access to. In addition, the scientists within STFC departments also develop complex simulations and undertake data analysis for their own experiments. Facilities also have strong ongoing collaborations with UK academic and commercial users through their involvement with Collaborative Computational Programme, generating very large simulation datasets. There is thus the need to support high resolution data analysis using distributed compute, data and visualization resources. At the same time, these requirements offer the computational and visualization scientists within STFC unique opportunities to advocate the take up of advanced visualization techniques and toolkits in distributed high performance, high resolution hardware environment. It gives an opportunity to understand the requirements and usefulness of distributed visualization. Given this seemingly advantageous position, the STFC vizNET ≪http://www.viznet.ac.uk/≫ partners have been actively pursuing visualization awareness activities and services aimed at application holders of various scientific disciplines. These activities include holding workshops, hands-on tutorials, show case demonstrations and the setting up of hardware based visualization services with technical support. This report provides details of these activities, the outcomes, the status and some suggestions as to the way forward.