What is QuickCompare?

QuickCompare is an offshoot of QuickView, an interactive tool for inspecting data files produced by Earth system simulations. Instead of presenting a single simulation, QuickCompare contrasts two or more simulations that use the same horizontal mesh (and hence the same connectivity information). Plots can be shown for the user-selected physical quantities themselves as well as differences and relative differences between simulations. Like QuickView, QuickCompare is designed to present multiple variables simultaneously to help identify potential relationships.

Useful resources: see linked page.

Key Features

• Intuitive, minimalist interface tailored for Earth system modeling.
• Physical quantities displayed together with differences and/or relative differences between simulations.
• Multi-variable visualization.
• Persistent sessions—pick up where you left off.
• Support for EAM v2, v3, and upcoming v4 output formats as well as the E3SM land model ELM's input and output files on ne*pg2 grids.

Project Background

The lead developer of QuickCompare is Will Dunklin at Kitware. Other key contributors include Sebastien Jourdain, Patrick O'Leary, Berk Geveci, and Dan Lipsa at Kitware as well as Hui Wan and Kai Zhang at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

QuickCompare is a product of an interdisciplinary collaboration supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) and Biological and Environmental Research (BER) via the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program.

The development of QuickCompare used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy User Facility.