CCPSurvey2014

Over 2014 the visualisation group, part of the Technology Division within SCD, has reconsidered the real visualisation needs of the computational sciences community. A series of informal and formal surveys are underway and the first ones have tackled the Tomographic Imaging and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) communities. These wanted to find out which tools were actually being used and the best methods to support them.

Executive Summary

Key was a difference between choice of primary and secondary package:

• Three packages are the most-used packages by 26% of respondents.
• Conversely, another 31 packages are used by one or two users and account for a further 26% of respondents.

Producing publication quality plots is the most-used technique. However, the features making these packages the favourites are:

1. Software that is written specifically for their domain of interest.
2. Large datasets are handled efficiently.
3. Scripting or other ability to extend the tool is required.

Users second most favoured packages are general purpose visualisation tools.

Users were given five options for selecting their most required development. None emerged as being more needed than the others.

Conversely, large amounts of memory was clearly the most important requirement for high performance visualisation.

The main future challenges are suggested to be

1. The ability to handle large amounts of data
2. The ability to operate in a distributed environment.

Survey Presentation

Surprisingly, open source was not always the most important issue but the easy creation of plug-ins, new readers and writers, as well as analysis tools have been requested. � There was also indicated a strong growth in the use of the ParaView visualisation system (http://www.paraview.org/) that is an open source, multi-platform data analysis and visualisation application where users can build systems including adding qualitative and quantitative techniques.

Q1 Home institutions

500px

Q2 Which CCP(s) are you involved with?

Q3 What software do you use for visualisation of data?

Q4 What visualisation techniques are important to your work?

Q5 Comments on the respondents' most used visualisation tool.

Q6 Same as question 5, for any other tool used.

Q7 Visualisation requirements. How important do you see the provision of the following (ed. Services)?

Q8 Requirements for high performance/advanced visualisation facilities. Do you have any need for access to (ed Services)

Q9 What do you see as the main challenges for visualisation in your domain now and in the near future?

500px

Q10 Any other comments?

Raw Comments

1. Would be nice if there was an obvious preferred open source tomographic reconstruction code that we (STFC/EPSRC) could recommend to users and modify ourselves for our own needs. If there are candidates here, maybe publicise the options more widely?
2. Would be nice to have somebody looking into maintenance and support of useful tools and software.
3. Visualisation and application of calibrations to data go hand-in-hand together, thus the greatest visualisation tool won't be used much if it isn't integrated into a data handling flow. A good example is XCrysDen, which makes all the difference between just number crunching with wien2k and actually seeing what you're doing.
4. It would be great if the visulisation tool developers would start to collaborate to develop libraries, data formats etc that could be shared between them, to speed up the development of new tools and functionality, and allow users access to the full spectrum of tools they require.
5. I'm happy to get involved with this CCP/project or any initiative it might lead on with. I'm passionate about data visualisation and have experience in developing such tools.
6. Training on visualisation tools are really lacking. There should be more of them.
7. More seminars to introduce what is available
8. There is a strong need for web-based visualization methods to integrate into web-based applications we are developing.
9. License sharing and advanced usage training
10. Lack of tools limits the science we are able to achieve.
11. Final note - Martin Turner at RAL is brilliant at cross promotion (between communities) and compiling enthusiastic newsletters and should be thoughtfully priased for his dedication to the subject. He and his team are successfully promoting they ideas that other communities are way ahead in.
12. I'm not sure if Diamond are as involved as they could be. If they are it certainly isn't communicated well to Users.
13. Many of the packages are great for visualization but quick mathematics (e.g. subtract two 3d data sets) requires recoding.

Future results

There will be a six month review in Spring 2015 - but remember from the presentation "The user and viewer are always important"