Substrate

Substrate is a tool that allows you to automate the process of deploying visualization tools to different computing environments.

Supported Visualization tools

• Volume Rendering via Tapestry
• Flow Visualization via VCI

Supported Environments

Any computing environment capable of running Docker Swarm is a valid deployment target.

Requirements

• Python 3.7 or later.

This tool relies upon Docker Swarm. In order for it to work, the following assumptions are made of each compute node (for AWS deployments, these requirements are handled automatically):

• Docker Engine must be installed.
• The ports needed by Docker Swarm must be open for communication between nodes. Please review the Docker Swarm docs for more information.
• You must be able to connect to each node over SSH with a private key available in ~/.ssh.

Getting Started (none of this works yet)

To install run

pip install seelabutk-substrate

then launch a visualization tool via a CLI using

substrate 'tool_name' start
substrate 'tool_name' stop

or via Python using

from substrate import Substrate

stack = Substrate('tool_name')
stack.start()
stack.stop()

Valid tool names:

• tapestry
• vci

Configuration

Substrate is configured using substrate.config.yaml. The tool will look for this file starting in your current working directory then look for it in parent folders. You can also provide a path with

substrate tapestry start -c /path/to/substrate.config.yaml

or

stack = Substrate('tool_name', path='path/to/substrate.config.yaml')

The options for the configuration file can be found here.

Each tool has static files that are needed to run it. Defaults are provided, but if needed or desired they can be modified. Here are links to get the default files for Tapestry and VCI.

For more information on configuring each tool, please refer to each tools documentation:

• Tapestry
• VCI