The past week was really a fruitful and exciting week for me.
At the beginning the week, I continued the development of basic modules for the model comparison package. The first work is the enhancement of batch processing functions. The original batch processing I developed needs users to drag a set of variables to the workflow panel. This is impractical if users need to process a large number of variables. I added a new module that can read a set of variables from multiple NetCDF files using a configuration file. This way, users just need to specify all the variables in the configuration files, which greatly facilitate batch processing of large number of variables.
Another work that I have started but not yet finished was mosaic. This function is used to merge multiple tiles into one single file. This is very easy if the grids to be merged are rectangular grids. However, many NetCDF files have curvilinear grids. The challenge of merging curvilinear grids is to set up the target grid. I’m still working on this.
The most exciting thing in the past week was the face-to-face meeting with my mentors in Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL). Though the trip to ORNL was not smooth (my flight was canceled so I had to stay in Chicago for the whole night), the meeting went quite well. My mentor Bob and Yaxing gave me and a DataONE Post-doc Aritra some detailed introductions on DataONE and our summer intern project. We also had a good discuss of what we should do next. The tasks we identified including:
- We will work on several model-data intercomparison scenarios, including Daymet climatology analysis and linking data analysis with visualization.
- We will start the integration of or wok with Provenance WG summer work and DataONE Cyber infrastructure.
- We also will explore the possibility of putting the workflows into a web server so that users can interact with it just using a web browser.
The discussion made things become clearer. I now have a pretty good big picture for the summer intern project.
In addition to discussion, I also had the chance to visit the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) and saw the world’s fastest supercomputer Titan. I learned a lot from this visit, especially the state-of-art supercomputing/parallel computing technologies. This was an unforgettable experience.