# Post Processing in Modulus¶

## TensorBoard in Modulus¶

### Introduction¶

This section, shows you how to visualise the outputs of your model as it trains, by adding (custom) plots to TensorBoard. These visualisations provide an easy way to qualitatively assess the performance of your model. Plots can be made using Modulus validators (i.e. plotting the output of your model compared to some ground truth dataset) or inferencers (i.e. just plotting the output of your model given a set of inputs). You can use the default plotter provided, or you can define your own custom plotter. An example custom TensorBoard plot for the lid driven cavity example Lid Driven Cavity Background is shown here:

### Workflow Overview¶

Here is the overall workflow for adding plots to TensorBoard:

1. Instantiate either a ValidatorPlotter or a InferencerPlotter class from modulus.tensorboard_utils.plotter. For example, plotter = ValidatorPlotter().

2. Pass this plotter as an optional argument when creating a validator or inferencer object. For example, validator = PointwiseValidator(invar, true_outvar, nodes, plotter=plotter).

3. Add this validator or inferencer object to your domain / solver as you normally would.

Modulus handles the rest and at a certain number of training iterations, the plotter adds plots of the validator’s or inferencer’s inputs and outputs to TensorBoard. To define a custom plotter, you can define your own Plotter class which inherits from either ValidatorPlotter or InferencerPlotter and overrides it’s __call__ method. More details are given in the lid driven cavity example below.

Note

You can change the frequency at which these plots are added to TensorBoard by changing the values of rec_validation_freq and rec_inference_freq in your project’s configuration file Modulus Configuration. Plotting less frequently can avoid the creation of large TensorBoard event files.

The plots can be found in the Images tab in TensorBoard.

### Lid Driven Cavity Example¶

To show you how to use this workflow, an example of creating custom TensorBoard plots for the lid driven cavity (Lid Driven Cavity Background) example is provided below. First you define a custom ValidatorPlotter class, overriding its __call__ methods with a custom plotting function:

import numpy as np
import scipy.interpolate
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from modulus.tensorboard_utils.plotter import ValidatorPlotter

# define custom class
class CustomValidatorPlotter(ValidatorPlotter):

def __call__(self, invar, true_outvar, pred_outvar):
"Custom plotting function for validator"

# get input variables
x,y = invar["x"][:,0], invar["y"][:,0]
extent = (x.min(), x.max(), y.min(), y.max())

# get and interpolate output variable
u_true, u_pred = true_outvar["u"][:,0], pred_outvar["u"][:,0]
u_true, u_pred = self.interpolate_output(x, y,
[u_true, u_pred],
extent,
)

# make plot
f = plt.figure(figsize=(14,4), dpi=100)
plt.suptitle("Lid driven cavity: PINN vs true solution")
plt.subplot(1,3,1)
plt.title("True solution (u)")
plt.imshow(u_true.T, origin="lower", extent=extent, vmin=-0.2, vmax=1)
plt.xlabel("x"); plt.ylabel("y")
plt.colorbar()
plt.vlines(-0.05, -0.05, 0.05, color="k", lw=10, label="No slip boundary")
plt.vlines( 0.05, -0.05, 0.05, color="k", lw=10)
plt.hlines(-0.05, -0.05, 0.05, color="k", lw=10)
plt.legend(loc="lower right")
plt.subplot(1,3,2)
plt.title("PINN solution (u)")
plt.imshow(u_pred.T, origin="lower", extent=extent, vmin=-0.2, vmax=1)
plt.xlabel("x"); plt.ylabel("y")
plt.colorbar()
plt.subplot(1,3,3)
plt.title("Difference")
plt.imshow((u_true-u_pred).T, origin="lower", extent=extent, vmin=-0.2, vmax=1)
plt.xlabel("x"); plt.ylabel("y")
plt.colorbar()
plt.tight_layout()

return [(f, "custom_plot"),]

@staticmethod
def interpolate_output(x, y, us, extent):
"Interpolates irregular points onto a mesh"

# define mesh to interpolate onto
xyi = np.meshgrid(
np.linspace(extent[0], extent[1], 100),
np.linspace(extent[2], extent[3], 100),
indexing="ij",
)

# linearly interpolate points onto mesh
us = [scipy.interpolate.griddata(
(x, y), u, tuple(xyi)
)
for u in us]

return us


Note

The inputs to __call__ are dictionaries of the model’s inputs and output variables, as specified when you initialise the validator or inferencer object associated with the plotter. For ValidatorPlotter, the ground truth output variables are also passed. The __call__ function should return a list of type [(Figure, "<name>"), ...], where Figure is a matplotlib figure and "<name>" is a name string assigned to each figure in TensorBoard.

Next, change the following lines in the example code:

openfoam_validator = PointwiseValidator(
...,
plotter=CustomValidatorPlotter(),
)


Finally, run the example code. If all goes well, you should automatically see your plots being added to TensorBoard in the Images tab as the model trains.

## VTK Utilities in Modulus¶

### Introduction¶

The primary output file format supported by Modulus are Visualization Toolkit (VTK) files which are widely used across multiple scientific domains. A key benefit of VTK files is VTK’s large library of filters one can use on the data as well as support from industry standard visualization software support such as ParaView. If you are unfamiliar with VTK and ParaView, the reader is encouraged to look over the ParaView documentation which will help with getting started. Modulus supports several VTK utilities to help make importing and exporting data effortless.

VTK outputs are selected by default in Modulus, which can be controlled using the save_filetypes parameter in the Hydra config. Modulus supports several VTK data formats (legacy and XML versions) including:

Table 1 Modulus VTK Data Types

VTK Class

Modulus Wrapper

Description

File extension

vtkUniformGrid

VTKUniformGrid

Data stored on a uniform grid, such as an image.

.vti

vtkRectilinearGrid

VTKRectilinearGrid

Data stored on a rectilinear domain, such as a square domain with non-uniform mesh density.

.vtr

vtkStructuredGrid

VTKStructuredGrid

Data stored on a structured domain. This includes structured meshes with curved boundaries.

.vts

vtkUnstructuredGrid

VTKUnstructuredGrid

Data stored on an unstructured mesh domain.

.vtu

vtkPolyData

VTKPolyData

General polygon data. Can contain objects including points, lines, faces, cells, etc.

.vtp

Generally speaking, these file types are listed most to least restrictive. Modulus primarily will use vtkPolyData to output data given its flexibility, but other formats can offer significant memory savings if applicable.

Warning

Modulus currently does not support multi-block VTK files.

### Converting Variables to VTK Files¶

The workhorses of Modulus’ post-processing are the two functions var_to_polyvtk and grid_to_vtk, which are used for unstructured point data and grid data, respectively. Both of these functions take dictionaries of numpy arrays and write them to VTK files. When writing a custom constraint, inferencer or validator, using one of these functions will likely be needed to record your results.

#### var_to_polyvtk¶

This function converts the dictionary, Dict[str: np.array], of variable data into a point cloud using a vtkPolyData dataset. The number of datapoints in the first dimension of all arrays in the input dictionary must be consistent. Additionally, the dictionary must include variables that represent the items’ spatial location. While not memory efficient, this function will ubiquitously work with all data as long as spatial coordinates are provided.

To better understand the conversion, consider the following minimal example for a 2D point cloud:

import numpy as np
from modulus.plot_utils.vtk import var_to_polyvtk

n_points = 500
save_var = {
"U": np.random.randn(n_points, 2), # Different number of var dims supported
"p": np.random.randn(n_points, 1),
"x": np.random.uniform(0, 1 ,size=(n_points, 1)),  # x coordinates
"y": np.random.uniform(0, 1 ,size=(n_points, 1)), # y coordinates
# Modulus will fill in z locations with zero
}
var_to_polyvtk(save_var, "./test_file")


#### grid_to_vtk¶

This function converts a dictionary, Dict[str: np.array], of variable data into a uniform grid using a vtkUniformGrid dataset. grid_to_vtk is built with image based data in mind, thus expects arrays to be of the form: [batch, D, xdim], [batch, D, xdim, ydim] or [batch, D, xdim, ydim, zdim] for 1D, 2D and 3D data, respectively. Note that all spatial dimensions must be identical between dictionary entries. Unlike var_to_polyvtk, no coordinates are provided. A good example of this function being used in a custom constraint is in the Turbulence Super Resolution example.

The following minimal example will demonstrate this function for a 3D grid:

import numpy as np
from modulus.plot_utils.vtk import grid_to_vtk

n_points = 20
batch_size = 2
save_var = {
"U": np.random.randn(batch_size, 2, n_points, n_points, n_points),
"p": np.random.randn(batch_size, 1, n_points, n_points, n_points),
}
# Export second example in batch
grid_to_vtk(save_var, "./test_file", batch_index=1)


### VTK Validator and Inferencer¶

Modulus also has a validator and inferencer node that builds from a VTK object directly called PointVTKValidator and PointVTKInferencer. These objects take one of Modulus built in VTK classes as an input and automatically queries the model at the point locations. The advantage of these is that mesh data is kept in the validator/inferencer which is added into the output file.

#### Constructing VTK Objects from Scratch¶

The first use case of this is to define your own VTK object from scratch in Modulus. Let’s consider adding a new inferencer to the Lid Driven Cavity Background example. In this example below we can define a uniform mesh to conduct inference on:

from modulus.plot_utils.vtk import VTKUniformGrid
from modulus.continuous.inferencer.inferencer import PointVTKInferencer

vtk_obj = VTKUniformGrid(
bounds=[[-width / 2, width / 2], [-height / 2, height / 2]],
npoints=[128, 128],
export_map={"U": ["u", "v", None], "p": ["p"]},
)
grid_inference = PointVTKInferencer(
vtk_obj=vtk_obj,
nodes=nodes,
input_vtk_map={"x": "x", "y": "y"},
output_names=["u", "v", "p"],
batch_size=1024,
)


VTKUniformGrid is a Modulus wrapper for the vtkUniformGrid class and can be used to quickly define uniform domains. Here we have defined a square domain of resolution $$128\times 128$$. Adding this to your ldc_2d.py from Lid Driven Cavity Background will add an addition inferencer with and output file vtk_inf.vti which is visulized as a mesh rather than a point cloud.

Note

The export_map, which is a dictionary, Dict[str, List[str]] used to map between vtk variable names and modulus variable names. In this example the U field in the VTK file will contain Modulus variables u and v in the first and second dimension with zeros in the third.

Note

input_vtk_map defines which parameters from the VTK object to use as model inputs. This can be used to access point data arrays in the VTK file and also coordinates.

#### Reading VTK Objects from File¶

The second and more powerful use case of these VTK inferencers/validators is the ability to load VTK meshes directly from file. This means you can directly import testing data from a fluid simulation result and preserve the internal mesh data for visualization. Lets take a look at an example of reading in a OpenFOAM simulation file and using it for building a validator:

from modulus.plot_utils.vtk import VTKFromFile
from modulus.continuous.validator.validator import PointVTKValidator

vtk_obj = VTKFromFile(
to_absolute_path("./openfoam/cavity_openfoam.vtk"), # Legacy VTK files supported
export_map={"U_pred": ["u", "v", None]},
)
points = vtk_obj.get_points()
points[:, 0] += -width / 2  # center OpenFoam data
points[:, 1] += -height / 2  # center OpenFoam data
vtk_obj.set_points(points)

openfoam_validator = PointVTKValidator(
vtk_obj=vtk_obj,
nodes=nodes,
input_vtk_map={"x": "x", "y": "y"},
true_vtk_map={"u": ["U:0"], "v": ["U:1"]},
batch_size=1024,
)


Since cavity_openfoam.vtk is an unstructured grid, the output from this validator would be vtk_validator.vtu and contain the same mesh structure. Adding this code to your ldc_2d.py from Lid Driven Cavity Background will now produce a meshed validation result in ParaView.

Note

The true_vtk_map tells Modulus what point fields to use as target values. Here we are defining two target variables u and v which use the data in the first and second component of the field U in the VTK file.

Warning

Modulus only supports the use of point data arrays in VTK objects.

This includes building validators/inferencers from more complex meshes as well. Despite our system only being 2D, we can project it onto a 3D object using a VTK point inferencer. For example, downloading the Stanford bunny and converting it into a VTK format in ParaView allows us to then inference on this mesh.

from modulus.plot_utils.vtk import VTKFromFile
from modulus.continuous.inferencer.inferencer  import PointVTKInferencer

vtk_obj = VTKFromFile(
to_absolute_path("./bunny.vtk"), # Legacy VTK files supported
export_map={"U_pred": ["u", "v", None]},
)

openfoam_inferencer = PointVTKInferencer(
vtk_obj=vtk_obj,
nodes=nodes,
input_vtk_map={"x": "x", "y": "y"}, # Invariant to z location
output_names=["u", "v", "p"],
batch_size=1024,
)


With the VTK file bunny.vtk or any VTK unstructured mesh of your choosing, you can place this code into the lid driven cavity example. The result is vtk_bunny.vtp, shown below, which contains the result from querying the network at the mesh vertex points of the Stanford bunny. While this is not a very practical result, this illustrates how one can quickly load a predefined geometry and conduct inference on it.

### Voxel Inferencer¶

The VoxelInferencer is a unique class that can be particularly useful when you do not have a volume mesh of your geometry. This includes cases when Modulus’ geometry module is being used or you just have a mesh of the boundary.

The VoxelInferencer works by defining a uniform grid over a square domain. A masking function, such as a s.d.f., is provided which then flags which points lie inside the inference domain. Masked points are set to NaN, which can then be filtered out in ParaView. Let’s take a look at an example use case with the Lid Driven Cavity Background example:

from modulus.continuous.inferencer.inferencer  import VoxelInferencer

# Define mask function, should be a callable with parameters being the variables
mask_fn = lambda x, y: x**2 + y**2 > 0.001

voxel_inferencer = VoxelInferencer(
bounds = [[-width / 2, width / 2], [-height / 2, height / 2], [0, 0.1]],
npoints = [128, 128, 128],
nodes=nodes,
output_names=["u", "v", "p"],
export_map={"U": ["u", "v", None], "p": ["p"]},

Here we have defined a unform grid of the resolution $$128\times 128\times 128$$. The mask_fn defines which points should set to NaN and ignored during inference, in this case outside of a circle. Adding this to ldc_2d.py will output the file vox_inf.vti. Initially upon loading this VTK file in ParaView, all masked and unmasked points will be shown. Use the Threshold filter on the default settings to remove the masked points leaving a nice cylinder.
PointVTKInferencer also supports the use of mask functions and can be combined with VTKUniformGrid` to achieve the same result. Examples such as STL Geometry: Blood Flow in Intracranial Aneurysm and Industrial Heat Sink do this to inference their complex domains at a specific resolution.