EclipseCon North America 2014 Presentation

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

The slides can be downloaded here.

Abstract

Nuclear energy is a big part of the global energy infrastructure and will be crucial in meeting future energy demand. To that end, the U.S. government has funded large modeling and simulation programs in order to develop the next generation of nuclear reactors (and understand the old ones!). However, these programs produce petabytes of data when simulating a “full core” reactor, leaving the user with an important question: “How can I extract knowledge from so much data!?”

Since much of the simulation data is not immediately consumable, we developed a C++ library and several plugins for our Eclipse RCP product that help researchers explore their simulation results in easy, intuitive ways. We will demonstrate our system and share design decisions made to streamline the user experience. We will present a number of SWT components that exploit the hierarchical structure of a nuclear reactor facility, including a plant level view built on jMonkeyEngine, several grid views based on the Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) for rectangular, circular, and hexagonal grids, and plotting widgets built on SWT XYGraph. We will also present a custom extension of JFace Actions used to generate reusable dynamic menus. We will show how we integrate these reactor views into an Eclipse Form Editor supported by custom Eclipse Views, our own data mining routines, and third party libraries.

Attendees will see how the Eclipse RCP and GEF can be used to build extensible 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 at EclipseCon North-America 2013