Science Highlights

New Version of C3

May 9, 2013

A new version of the Cluster Command Control (C3) tools has been released. The C3 tools are used as a core piece of the OSCAR cluster management suite, which has been updated to support the latest Ubuntu Linux distribution. These updated cluster tools are used internally by members of Computer Science Research to maintain group machines. They are also used stand-alone by a variety of users from industry, academia and laboratories.

C3 is a suite of cluster tools developed at ORNL that are useful for both administration and application support. The suite includes tools for cluster-wide command execution, file distribution/gathering, process termination and with proper privileges remote node shutdown. The tools can be installed for general system use or run from a user's home directory. By default, the tools use SSH to connect to the remote machines and support a rich set of options for cluster or multi-cluster setup.

Open Source Cluster Application Resources (OSCAR) is a cluster installation and management suite that can be used to setup an system with common HPC software, e.g., job schedulers, message passing libraries, etc. The latest version of the suite was extended to support lab approved Linux and system management policies. This enhanced version of OSCAR was used to deploy two clusters maintained by CSR members: HAL9000 and SAL9000. These platforms are used for research and development of HPC system software and resilience research.

For more information about these tools and cluster platforms, see:

Contact information: srt-contact@ornl.gov

Project Background

ORNL is a founding member of the OSCAR project and has maintained a leadership role in the development and maintenance of the suite over the past decade. The C3 tools were first developed at ORNL in 2000. The C3 project was started by Stephen Scott and Brian Luethke as the lead developers. In addition to community patches and bug reports, over the years several individuals have contributed to the development and maintenance of C3, to include: Mike Brim, John Mugler, Geoffroy Vallee, Wesley Bland, and Thomas Naughton.

Edge-Edge Interactions in Stacked Graphene Nanoplatelets

February 14, 2013

CSMD researcher Bobby Sumpter was part of a team whose work on graphene platelets was published in the American Chemical Society's ACSNano Journal.

edge to edge

Intrinsic stacking interactions of small graphene platelets cause modifications in the local environment of larger graphene plates. Ramifications include: limiting the epitaxial growth of a platelet or arresting the reconstruction of an edge during combined Joule heating and electron irradiation experiments.

The team used high-resolution transmission electron microscopy studies to show the dynamics of small graphene platelets on larger graphene layers. The platelets move nearly freely to eventually lock in at well-defined positions close to the edges of the larger underlying graphene sheet. While such movement is driven by a shallow potential energy surface described by an interplane interaction, the lock-in position occurs via edge-edge interactions of the platelet and the graphene surface located underneath. Here, the team quantitatively studied this behavior using van der Waals density functional calculations. Local interactions at the open edges are found to dictate stacking configurations that are different from Bernal (AB) stacking. These stacking configurations are known to be otherwise absent in edge-free two-dimensional graphene. The results explain the experimentally observed platelet dynamics and provide a detailed account of the new electronic properties of these combined systems.

ACS Nano, 2013, 7 (3), pp 2834-2841 DOI: 10.1021/nn4004204 Publication Date (Web): February 14, 2013 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/nn4004204 Copyright© 2013 American Chemical Society

Surface-Induced Orientation Control of CuPc Molecules for the Epitaxial Growth of Highly Ordered Organic Crystals on Graphene

Spring 2013

ORNL researchers were part of a team that showed how graphene is able to direct the assembly of copper phthalocyanine (CuPc) molecules into epitaxially-aligned superstructures relevant to organic electronics. Theoretical modeling of the mechanisms responsible for this alignment revealed that van der Waals interactions and interfacial dipole interactions induced by charge transfer both play important roles.

(left) Theoretical modeling of CuPc molecules interactions with graphene in both face-on and side-on orientations (right) STM image of CuPc molecules aligned in the face-on orientation on graphene. Bottom left inset is a higher magnification STM image, top right inset schematically shows the molecular orientation.

 

 

 

This work provides a fundamental understanding of molecular interactions at interfaces important to controlling the nanoscale morphology and orientation of organic semiconductors and to improving optoelectronic processes for high-performance organic electronic devices. Here, graphene is demonstrated to effectively template CuPc molecules to nucleate, orient, and pack in the face-on orientation, the ideal structure for high-performance organic photovoltaics.

Reference:
"Surface-Induced Orientation Control of CuPc Molecules for the Epitaxial Growth of Highly Ordered Organic Crystals on Graphene"
Kai Xiao1, Wan Deng,2 Jong K. Keum,3 Mina Yoon,1 Ivan V. Vlassiouk,4 Kendal W. Clark,1 An-Ping Li,1 Ivan I. Kravchenko,1 Gong Gu,2 Edward A. Payzant,3 Bobby G. Sumpter1, Sean C. Smith1, James F. Browning,3 David B. Geohegan1
1Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
2Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of Tennessee at Knoxville
3Neutron Scattering Science Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
4Measurement Science and System Engineering Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
J. Am. Chem. Soc. DOI: 10.1021/ja3125096

Acknowledgement of Support:This research was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is sponsored at Oak Ridge National Laboratory by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy. KX, MY, and DBG acknowledge partial support provided by a LDRD(#6521). This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231

An Integrated Website and Software System for the National Isotope Development Center

A new database-driven website, isotopes.gov, has been designed and developed for the National Isotope Development Center (NIDC), which is the sole government source of stable and radio-isotope products for science, medicine, security, and applications. Since going live in May 2011, isotopes.gov has provided customers detailed information concerning NIDC activities, funding opportunities, jobs & training, meetings & workshops, outreach & education, production research, and the Isotope Business Office (IBO). The website also hosts the Online Isotope Product Catalog, which allows customers to interactively explore the catalog and submit requests for quotations and new products. In addition to the website, a suite of intra-office software tools, the NIDC Online Management Toolkit (OMT), has been released. The OMT provides NIDC staff the capability to quickly and easily modify the product catalog, harvest website statistics, dynamically generate monthly reports, and administer OMT user accounts.

Developed by Eric Lingerfelt (CSM) and Michael Smith (Physics), the website has successfully brought the NIDC’s web presence forefront and encouraged interaction with new and existing customers. It has also served to educate the public on the important role that isotopes play in society. During FY12, for example, the Online Isotope Product Catalog registered 45,000 unique isotope product hits and generated 710 quotation requests. isotopes.gov was also used in Fall 2012 to announce and respond to queries on the auction of 4,000 liters of purified He-3 gas worth $10 million. The OMT facilitates the NIDC’s objectives by providing a web-deliverable, cross-platform content management system for the Online Isotope Product Catalog and easy-to-use tools to dynamically generate monthly reports that are used by DOE to guide future isotope production decisions.

This work is funded by the Isotope Development and Production for Research and Applications (IDPRA) subprogram of the Office of Nuclear Physics in the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.

High-Temperature Transformation of Fe-Decorated Single-Wall Carbon Nanohorns to Nanooysters: A Combined Experimental and Theoretical Study

K. R. S. Chandrakumar, J. D. Readle, C. Rouleau, A. Puretzky, D. B. Geohegan, K. More, V. Krishnan, M. Tian, G. Duscher, B. G. Sumpter, S. Irle, K. Morokuma

Scientific Achievement
Elucidated a growth mechanism for new hybrid "nanooysters" - encapsulated metal nanoparticles in hollow carbon shells - that were formed by transforming carbon nanocones with metal nanoparticles at elevated temperatures. Nanooysters can be readily produced and could promise new functional properties as encapsulated metallic quantum dots.

Significance
This work establishes a "nano-enabled materials design" approach, wherein theory, synthesis, and characterization are used to unravel the atomistic mechanisms driving the formation of new type of carbon-metal system.

Research Details
CNMS and ShaRE Capabilities:

Reference:
"High-Temperature Transformation of Fe-Decorated Single-Wall Carbon Nanohorns to Nanooysters: A Combined Experimental and Theoretical Study"

Acknowledgement of Support:
This research was conducted in part at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS), and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Shared Research Equipment (ShaRE) User Facility, both of which are sponsored by the Scientific User Facilities Division, DOE-BES. Experimental synthesis research supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Basic Energy Sciences (BES), Materials Sciences and Engineering Division. The theoretical work was in part supported by a CREST (Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology) grant in the Area of High Performance Computing for Multiscale and Multiphysics Phenomena from the Japanese Science and Technology Agency (JST). SI acknowledges support by the Program for Improvement of Research Environment for Young Researchers from MEXT of Japan. The computations were performed using the resources of the CNMS and the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Nanoscale. DOI: 10.1039/c0xx00000x

In Situ Formation of Pyridyl-Functionalized Poly(3-hexylthiophene)s via Quenching of the Grignard Metathesis Polymerization: Toward Ligands for Semiconductor Quantum Dots

W. Michael Kochemba, Deanna L. Pickel, Bobby G. Sumpter, Jihua Chen, S. Michael Kilbey

Scientific Achievement
Demonstrated a facile one-pot method for preparing functional materials based on pyridyl-terminated poly(3-hexylthiophenese) (P3HTs). The pyridyl-functionalized P3HTs efficiently decorate CdSe semiconductor quantum dots (SQDs) and stabilize the morphology of CdSe/P3HT blends after thermal annealing.

Significance
This work establishes a “materials by design” approach, wherein theory, synthesis, and characterization are used to rationally design new materials for optoelectronic applications. The ability to manipulate end group compositions coupled with the propensity of pyridyl-functionalized P3HTs to ligate SQDs enables tuning the morphology of conjugated polymer/SQD blends to achieve improved hybrid photovoltaic materials.

(Above) Binding energies calculated using density functional theory (DFT)
were used to guide selection of pyridyl end groups for synthetic development.

Research Details
CNMS capability: Novel polymer synthesis and characterizations for the development of new soft materials. Density functional theory calculations for guiding the selection of optimal end groups. Pyridyl-functionalized P3HTs for ligands to decorate CdSe SQDs for stabilizing blend morphology.

(Above) TEM micrographs of thin films consisting of 20 wt % surface-modified CdSe SQDs in a P3HT matrix (Mn = 25 kDa) showing arrest of CdSe aggregation for the pryidyl-funtionalized P3HT sample (right panel) vs native dodecyl-phosphonic acid ligand (left panel).

This research was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS), which is sponsored at Oak Ridge National Laboratory by the Scientific User Facilities Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, U. S. Department of Energy. The computations were performed using the resources of the CNMS and the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Chem. Mater. DOI: 10.1021/cm302915hr.

Signatures of Cooperative Effects and Transport Mechanisms in Conductance Histograms

M.G. Reuter, M.C. Hersam, T. Seideman, M.A. Ratner

Achievement
We develop a tractable model for simulating conductance histograms, which are a common form of reporting experimental data on electron transport processes in nanometer-scale systems (e.g. conductance through molecular wires). With this model, we can investigate the roles of the various physical parameters on data reported in a conductance histogram. For transport through a single wire, the histogram peak elucidates the mechanism of electron transport. The peak additionally reveals the relative frequencies of these mechanisms if more than one contributes to conduction. A histogram peak from multiple wires indicates the presence of cooperative effects (crosstalk) between the wires and also encodes information on the underlying conduction channels. Before this study, this information, albeit present in existing experimental data, was ignored.

Significance
This work helps build a bridge between theory/computation and experiment to better understand electron transport processes through nanometer-scale systems. Theory has generally focused on conductance through a molecule in a fixed configuration, whereas, in most cases, experiment cannot determine, let alone control, the molecular configuration. Our general model adds, for the first time, elements of stochasticity, which connects well-established theory with observable experimental data. We find that, in addition to an average molecular conductance, conductance histograms reveal transport mechanisms and cooperative effects. Finally, this work paves the way to infer theoretical parameters from experimental data.

Credit - This work was published in Nano Lett. This research was supported in part (i) by the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship Program, (ii) by the Eugene P. Wigner Fellowship Program, and (iii) at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is sponsored at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory by the Scientific User Facilities Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy.

"Signatures of Cooperative Effects and Transport Mechanisms in Conductance Histograms", M.G. Reuter, M.C. Hersam, T. Seideman, M.A. Ratner, Nano Lett. (2012), DOI: 10.1021/nl204379j.

Electronic Control over Attachment and Self-Assembly of Alkyne Groups on Gold

Achievement
Demonstrated a non-thermal, electron-induced approach to the self-assembly of phenylacetylene molecules on gold that allows for a previously unachievable attachment of the molecules to the surface through the alkyne group. While thermal excitation can only desorb the parent molecule due to prohibitively high activation barriers for attachment reactions, localized injection of hot electrons or holes not only overcomes this barrier but also enables an unprecedented control over the size and shape of the self-assembly, defect structures, and the reverse process of molecular disassembly from a single molecule to a mesoscopic length scale.

Significance
Self-assembled monolayers are the basis for molecular nanodevices, flexible surface functionalization, and dip-pen nanolithography. Yet self-assembled monolayers are typically produced by a rather inefficient process that involves thermally driven attachment reactions of precursor molecules to a metal surface, followed by a slow and defect-prone molecular reorganization. The electron-induced excitation method demonstrated in this work may therefore enable new and highly controlled approaches to molecular self-assembly on a surface.

Credit - This work is published in ACS Nano. A portion of this Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences was sponsored by the Scientific User Facilities Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy.

"Electronic Control over Attachment and Self-Assembly of Alkyne Groups on Gold", Q. Li, C. Han, M. Fuentes-Cabrera, H. Terrones, B.G. Sumpter, W. Lu, J. Bernholc, J. Yi, Z.Gai, A.P. Baddorf, P. Maksymovych, M. Pan, ACS Nano DOI: 10.1021/nn303734r (2012).

ORNL Releases Version 1.4 of ADIOS

Researchers using supercomputers to glean insight into scientific problems can spend much of their time just trying to get massive amounts of data in and out of a machine. CSMD's Scientific Data Group works to minimize this process, and this week its members took a big step forward by releasing its newest update to the Adaptable Input/Output System (ADIOS), version 1.4, which allows users more time to focus on achieving scientific insight and less on managing data.

"Our goal is to take our research and put it in production," says Scott Klasky, group leader of the Scientific Data Group at ORNL. Klasky's group researches methods to streamline this process, called input/output (I/O), on supercomputers.
The group's project started in 2008, when Klasky and his team created ADIOS to help increase by ten-fold I/O on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's(OLCF's) Jaguar supercomputer. Four updates and 65 journal publications later, Klasky's team is still looking for ways to make I/O even more efficient.

Version 1.4 represents a fundamental shift in the middleware that goes in tandem with shifts in supercomputing architectures. The Cray XT5 Jaguar, capable of 3.3 thousand trillion calculations per second, is being overhauled and transformed into a Cray XE6 dubbed Titan. The machine will be capable of 20 thousand trillion calculations per second by using a combination of traditional central processing units (CPUs) and fast and efficient graphics processing units (GPUs).
Click HERE to read the full article.

Two Open Source Benchmarks from the Extreme Scale System Center (ESSC)

The first Open Source release, SystemBurn, was designed to address the emergent emphasis on power demand engendered in the co-design of trans-petascale and exascale computing systems. SystemBurn assists scientists and engineers in examining the limits and trade-offs between power and throughput, as well as a tool to test systems and their environment. SystemBurn accomplishes this by providing a library of common computational algorithms and an execution framework to compose them into tests to simulate the behavior of real applications or to create maximal synthetic power loads permitting the researcher to establish an upper limits so that power and cooling maybe accurately provisioned. The library includes synthetic loads to simultaneously exercise the various components of a system, including the CPU, memory, accelerators, storage, and network, providing the user with the ability to measure the system at its electrical and thermal maximums. In addition to maximizing electrical usage, the variety of loads supplied with SystemBurn make it possible to gather power and thermal profiles associated with specific tasks to simulate real applications. As part of the Open Source release, SystemBurn has been enhanced to provide performance statistics in addition to the thermal information it already collects, allowing users to correlate throughput performance with power usage. Future enhancements to SystemBurn will enable auto-tuning of load selection, giving a user with little or no prior knowledge of the system a good basis for maximizing power draw.

The second Open Source release, SystemConfidence, addresses the increasing impact that the variability of small scale latencies can have on application scalability on extreme scale systems. SystemConfidence implements an execution framework, measurement tools, and analysis tools for studying the "real-world" latencies in HPC systems (currently, communication and I/O). Utilizing the Oak Ridge Benchmarking (ORB) Timer library, SystemConfidence can expose unexpected characteristics in networks through statistical analysis of operational latencies. SystemConfidence has identified application scalability impacts of system software upgrades, performance defects in commodity and custom interconnect products, and design improvements which were subsequently incorporated into two contemporary market offerings.
SystemBurn and SystemConfidence were developed as part of the ESSC partnership with the Department of Defense. Principal authors are Jeff Kuehn, Josh Lothian, and Steve Poole. The whole ESSC team contributed ideas; numerous summer students contributed code to the projects. Development can be tracked at https://github.com/jlothian/systemburn and https://github.com/jlothian/sysconfidence respectively.

Covalently bonded three-dimensional carbon nanotube solids via boron induced nanojunctions

Achievement
This work exemplifies collaborative nanoscience research between multiple institutions to pioneer the bulk synthesis of 3D macroscale nanotube elastic solids directly via a boron-doping strategy in chemical vapor deposition, that influences the formation of atomic-scale ''elbow'' junctions and nanotube covalent interconnections. The enabling aspect of boron doping was elucidated from detailed theoretical calculations and validated by elemental analysis, revealing that boron promotes formation of negative curvature "elbow'' junctions that leads to robust interwoven 3D networks, a "sponge-like" monolith. This novel material possesses ultra-light weight, super-hydrophobicity, high porosity, thermal stability, and mechanical flexibility, and is strongly oleophilic. These properties enable it as a reusable sorbent scaffold for efficiently removing oil from contaminated seawater.

Significance
The efficient, inexpensive and facile method developed is capable of producing bulk quantities of 3D carbon materials that have broad implications for practical material applications such as selective sorbent materials, hydrogen storage and flexible conductive scaffolds as porous 3D electrodes. The ultra-lightweight solid material exhibits enabling multifunctional properties including robust elastic mechanical properties with high damping, electrical conductivity, thermal stability, high porosity, super-hydrophobicity, oleophilic behavior and strong ferromagnetism. The environmental oil removal-and-salvage application from seawater was demonstrated where the nanotube "sponge" acts as an efficient scaffold that can be controlled and recollected via a magnetically driven process, and reused multiple times.
Credit - This work was published in Nature Sci. Rep. A portion of this Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences was sponsored by the Scientific User Facilities Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy.

"Covalently bonded three-dimensional carbon nanotube solids via boron induced nanojunctions", D.P. Hashim, N.T. Narayanan, J.M. Romo-Herrera, D.A. Cullen, M.G. Hahm, Peter Lezzi, Joseph R. Suttle, Doug Kelkhoff, E. Munoz-Sandoval,S. Ganguli, A.K. Roy, D.J. Smith, R. Vajtai, B.G. Sumpter, V. Meunier, H. Terrones, M. Terrones, P.M. Ajayan, Nature Sci, Rep. (2012).

ORNL ADIOS team releases version 1.3 of Adaptive Input/Output System

What good are supercomputers if you have to spend your whole time getting data in and out? Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are working to say goodbye to input/output (I/O) problems with their most recent upgrade of the Adaptive Input/Output System (ADIOS).

ADIOS grew out of a 2008 collaboration between the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) and researchers from academia, industry, and national laboratories. Their goal was a system to get information in and out of a supercomputer efficiently.

"The measurement of success for us has always been 'what percentage of time do you spend in I/O?'" said OLCF computational scientist Scott Klasky. ADIOS was inspired by Klasky's work at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where he noticed up to 30 percent of researchers' computational time was spent reading and writing analysis files.

The open-source middleware is designed to help researchers maximize their allocations on leadership-class computing resources from wherever they may be. In essence, it creates more time for research by minimizing the time needed to read and write data to files, even if researchers are sending those files from thousands of miles away.

The previous release-version 1.2-improved usability by allowing users to construct new variables in their simulations while they run, simplifying the interface users work with and improving I/O performance. In fact, researchers using the middleware found the writing process substantially expedited, consuming only .06 percent of their computation time on average.

The biggest challenge for the newest release-version 1.3-was to improve reading efficiency, according to Qing Liu, a scientific researcher working in the Remote Data Analysis and Visualization branch at the National Institute for Computational Sciences and the leading developer of ADIOS.

"Our users were very happy that the writing was greatly improved [with version 1.2]. They could get 30 gigabytes per second for the writing performance, but when they tried to read, the performance was much lower," he said. "There was a huge gap between writing and reading performance."

Ray Grout, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was one of the first people to test the latest update, using the S3D combustion code to study turbulent flows reacting to one another. Grout noted a huge increase in reading performance.

Klasky also added that ADIOS 1.4 will continue grass-root collaboration from computer science researchers to greatly reduce the problem of coping with large data on high-performance machines.

In addition to Klasky, Liu, and Grout, ADIOS 1.3 collaborators include William Tang, C.S. Chang, Weixing Wang, Stephane Ethier, and Zhihong Lin of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; Norbert Podhorszki, Jeremy Logan, Sean Ahern, Luis Chacon, Roselyne Tchoua, and Ricky Kendall of ORNL; Jackie Chen, Kenneth Moreland, Jay Lofstead, Ron Oldfield, and Todd Kordenbrock of Sandia National Laboratories; Xiaosong Ma, Nagiza Samatova, and Sriram Lakshminarasimhan of North Carolina State University; Garth Gibson and Milo Polte of Carnegie Mellon University; Karsten Schwan and Greg Eisenhauer of Georgia Tech; Hasan Abbasi of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville; Seung-Hoe Ku of New York University; John Wu, Arie Shoshani, and Jinoh Kim of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Weikuan Yu and Yuan Tian of Auburn University; Manish Parashar, Ciprian Docan, and Fan Zhang of Rutgers University; and Julian Cummings of the California Institute of Technology.

Source: http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-07-21/ornl_adios_team_releases_version_1.3_of_adaptive_input_output_system.html

Package allows analysis and visualization on the fly via Web

Computational scientists have a new weapon at their disposal. Earlier this year, the Electronic Simulation Monitoring (eSiMon) Dashboard version 1.0 was released to the public, allowing scientists to monitor and analyze their simulations in real-time.

Developed by the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah, North Carolina State University, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), this "window" into running simulations shows results almost as they occur, displaying data just a minute or two behind the simulations themselves. Ultimately, the Dashboard allows the scientists to worry about the "science" being simulated, rather than learn the intricacies of high-performance computing such as file systems and directories, an increasingly complex area as leadership systems continue to break the petaflop barrier.

"In my experience, Dashboard has been an essential tool for monitoring and controlling the large-scale simulation data from supercomputers," said Seung-Hoe Ku, an assistant research professor at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences who uses the Dashboard to monitor simulations of hot, ionized gas at the edge of nuclear fusion reactors, an area of great uncertainty in a device that could one day furnish the world with a nearly limitless abundance of clean energy. "The FLASH interface provides easy accessibility with Web browsers, and the design provides a simple and useful user experience. I have saved a lot of time for monitoring the simulation and managing the data using the Dashboard together with the EFFIS framework."

According to team member Roselyne Tchoua of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), the package offers three major benefits for computational scientists: first and foremost, it allows monitoring of the simulation via the Web. It is the only single tool available that provides access and insight into the status of a simulation from any computer on any browser; second, it hides the low-level technical details from the users, allowing the users to ponder variables and analysis instead of computational elements; and finally, it allows collaboration between simulation scientists from different areas and degrees of expertise. In other words, researchers separated geographically can see the same data simultaneously and collaborate on the spot.

Furthermore, via easy clicking and dragging, researchers can generate and retrieve publication-quality images and video. Hiding the complexity of the system creates a lighter and more accessible Web portal and a more inclusive and diverse user base.

The interface offers some basic features such as visualizing simulation-based images, videos and textual information. By simply dragging and dropping variable names from a tree view on the monitoring page onto the main canvas, users can view graphics associated with these variables at a particular time stamp. Furthermore, they can use playback features to observe the variables changing over time.
Researchers can also take electronic notes on the simulation as well as annotate movies. Other features include vector graphics with zoom/pan capabilities, data lineage viewing, and downloading processed and raw data onto local machines. Future versions will include hooks into external software and user-customized analysis and visualization tools.

"We are currently working on integrating the eSiMon application programming interface into an ADIOS method so that ADIOS users automatically get the benefit of monitoring their running simulation," said the OLCF's Scott Klasky, a leading developer of ADIOS, an open-source I/O performance library.

The "live" version of the dashboard is physically located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and can be accessed with an OLCF account at https://esimmon.ccs.ornl.gov. This version of the dashboard gives an overview of ORNL and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center computers. Users can quickly determine which systems are up or down, which are busy and where they would like to launch a job. Users can also view the status of their running and past jobs as well as those of their collaborators.

However, a portable version of eSiMon is also available for any interested party, and the platform cuts across scientific boundaries so that the Dashboard can be used for any type of scientific simulation. For information on acquiring and/or using the eSiMon dashboard, visit http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/center-projects/esimmon/.

Source: http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-02-28/olcf_partners_release_esimon_dashboard_simulation_tool.html