EclipseCon 2014 Presentation

This page provides additional resources for our presentation at EclipseCon North-America 2014: Prevent Three-Eyed Fish: Analyze Your Nuclear Reactor with Eclipse.

Slides are available here.

Abstract

Nuclear energy is a big part of the global energy infrastructure and will be critical in meeting future energy demand. To that end, the U.S. government has funded large modeling and simulation programs to help design the next generation of nuclear reactors (and understand the old ones!). These programs generate petabytes of data when simulating a “full core” and leave the user with a question: “How can I extract knowledge from that much data!?”

Since much of the simulation data is not directly consumable, we have developed a C++ library and several plugins for our Eclipse RCP product that help researchers understand their simulation results in easy, intuitive ways. We will demonstrate our system and share design decisions made to maximize the user experience. We will present several SWT components that exploit the hierarchical structure of a nuclear reactor to create parameterized views, including a new “Grid Viewer” built on the Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) for rectangular, circular, and hexagonal grids and plotting widgets based on SWT XYGraph. We will also present extensions to JFace Actions that allow us to generate dynamic menus accessible from multiple interactions. We will show how we integrate these views into an Eclipse Form Editor with our own data mining routines and third party libraries.

Attendees will see how the Eclipse RCP and GEF can be used to build data analysis environments and will glean new ideas to address challenges in their own Eclipse-based applications. Slides and additional content will be available at http://niceproject.sourceforge.net.

Additional Resources

Official EclipseCon 2014 session page.

Reactor Analyzer demo from NiCE 2.1.3. This shows the official introduction of sodium-cooled fast reactors into NiCE's post-simulation analysis.
Teaser for upcoming hex-grid support.
Reactor Analyzer demo from NiCE 2.1.01. This shows the recent introduction of GEF-based views in support of light water reactor simulation data analysis.

Our presentation last year at EclipseCon 2013.