Research Software Sustainability for the Open-Source Particle Visualization Framework MegaMol

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Thomas Ertl; Dr. Guido Reina
• Subject Area: Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; Technical Thermodynamics
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 391302154

This proposal has four main goals to ensure the ensure the sustainability of the visualization framework MegaMol. MegaMol is a GPU-centric framework for the interactive visualization of particle data. It is developed in context of the CRC 716, but meanwhile also employed in other research projects. This project will take into account the specific requirements of visualization software and the consequences these have on sustainability: consistent interactivity as well as good usability both contribute significantly to the successful adoption of a framework. This means additional effort (also for maintenance), which is not the case for, e.g., simulation software.Initially we focus on completely reworking the infrastructure for MegaMol development, distribution and documentation. We want to transition to a combination of free, cloud-based services and existing infrastructure and abstract that from the users and domain scientists to simplify deployment and usage of MegaMol. By switching to public platforms we want to emphasize the openness of MegaMol as well as its development to improve its dissemination.To improve dissemination, we will install MegaMol at specific sites with high visibility or particular infrastructure. That way, we want to demonstrate the benefits of employing MegaMol to more developers as well as domain scientists. This measure will be complemented by publications and a development blog for MegaMol.To make it more useful for a broad user base, we will redesign the user interface of MegaMol as a third aspect of this project. The new interface will take meta analysis of ensemble data as well as task-specific views onto the UI to ensure that users only see the relevant settings in a clear way. HTML5 will be the technical foundation of this user interface to unify the interaction paradigm at well as the runtime behavior of MegaMol, regardless of the usage scenario (desktop, cluster, remote, powerwall).The last work package concerns the public documentation of the project itself, including solved and unsolved challenges. We want to investigate which changes are required with regard to the infrastructure of the University of Stuttgart and which problems arise when employing heterogeneous resources, especially considering redundancy and changes to availability. The documentation of costs shall enable a longer-term estimate of required funding to ensure the sustainability of MegaMol.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)