VnVLabs is an simple, low-code framework for automated GUI building in scientific applications and libraries.
You can run a VnVLabs interface demo with the following command:
docker run -it -p 5000:5010-5000:5010 ghcr.io/vnvlabs/heat:run
This command will download a demo image and launch the container. To use the VnV interface, navigate to localhost:5000 in your web browser. If the machine running docker is not available through localhost (i.e, docker is running on a remote machine or inside a VM), you can set the specific ip address for the resource running docker as follows;
docker run -it -p 5000:5010-5000:5010 ghcr.io/vnvlabs/heat:run --address <ipaddress>
After that command, the interface will be available at :5000 in any modern browser.
The project consists of two parts:
- vnv : The VnV Toolkit API is an interface between scientific software.
- gui : The VnV Graphical user interface
The VnV Graphical User interface is a web-based user interface for designing, running and analyzing numerical simulations. The interface provides a built in IDE (using Eclipe Theia), built in 3D visualization (using Paraview Visualizer), and a custom built application execution interface. The GUI can be hosted locally, and on the web, making it an extremely effective approach for both local and remote development.
That said, the true power of the VnV Graphical User Interface comes from its integration with the VnV Toolkit. The VnV Toolkit provides a large set of macros that, when included in your code base, allow for features like; auto completion of input files, runtime integration testing, performance monitoring, automatic report generation, live data visualization and more.
The process of integrating VnV into your codebase depends on the build system you are using.
VnV Ship the relavent CMakeFiles required to locate VnV on a machine using the cmake find_package function. Once found, users can use the link_vnv_file function to link there library. Here is a really simple example CMake File for a one file application.
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.6)
project(Heat)
find_package(Injection REQUIRED)
add_executable(heat "heat.cpp")
link_vnv_executable(heat Heat cpp)
We have integrated VnV into a number of different applications:
- https://github.com/vnvlabs/heat
- https://github.com/vnvlabs/simple
- https://github.com/vnvlabs/asgard
- https://github.com/vnvlabs/hypre
- https://github.com/vnvlabs/mfem
The process of integrating the tool using non CMake Build Systems varies from application to application. The primary requirement is that you generate a compile_command.json file as part of the build. Some applications will already include targets to generate this file (i.e., MOOSE), and for other applications you will need to use a tool like "bear (TODO:Cite)" to generate the file. Once you have the file, you need to manually call the VnV code generation tool to generate the code required to integrate VnV (the CMake Integration does this automatically as part of the build).
Some examples include:
- https://github.com/vnvlabs/libmesh (Autotools project)
- https://github.com/vnvlabs/petsc (Custom build system)
- https://github.com/vnvlabs/xsbench (GNU Make)
The main repos are:
-
env: A dockerfile that installs all the dependencies required to get the toolkit, the plugins and the gui working on your machine. Use this as the base image when building a VnV docker image for your application.
-
vnv: The VnV Toolkit API. This needs to be installed if you want to use the VnV Toolkit customize the integration within the GUI.
-
plugins: A set of VnV Plugins that can be installed in addition to the toolkit to provide more VnV features (i.e., performance monitoring, UQ).
-
gui: This is the VnV GUI. The GUI is a Python Flask application.
-
applications/: The directory contains a number of different scientific applications that we have added VnV toolkit macros too.
Each repository contains its own licensing information. For the most part, all vnvlabs code (the core api, the gui, the SAAS server and a few of the application examples) are released using the three clause BSD license.
This repository includes a number of forks for third party software. All software forks (moose,libmesh,petsc,hypre,mfem,asgard, swfft,xs-bench,miniamr,etc.) exist for demonstration and testing purposes only! Do not use these forks in production. All modifications made in these forks are done so under the license provided in the third party software.
