tests on GPU - plots

[juliasloan25]

Purpose

We want to be able to produce plots in GPU runs. The easiest way to do this is to create a CPU-based space and copy all of the data over to that, then plot them. This will allocate a lot, but will still be useful for debugging and postprocessing

ncep_visualizer.jl and amip_visualizer.jl already work on GPU.

closes #750

Note: I think this same approach could be applied to the animations in viz_explorer, but I think it would involve creating a new space/field on CPU for each field at each timestep we want to plot. This will be really resource intensive, and I don't think it's worth doing until we have a cleaner way of transferring fields from GPU to CPU.

This was initially implemented in #614 but not merged there

To-do

• plot_helper.jl
• debug plots
• ci_plots.jl

To test

• run debug_plots test
• run driver with ci_plots = true (e.g. slabplanet_atmos_diags)

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[juliasloan25]

This config is copied from config/ci_configs/slabplanet_atmos_diags.yml. Once we remove job_id from inside the config file, we won't need to have both the CPU and GPU versions (though we'll have to make sure we always use anim: false for GPU runs)

[LenkaNovak]

We can always dispatch the plot_anim on device and do nothing for GPU.

[juliasloan25]

Good idea!

[LenkaNovak]

LGTM, thank you, @juliasloan25 ! It would be good to include the debug plot output in the CI runs, otherwise it's good to go.

[LenkaNovak]

We can always dispatch the plot_anim on device and do nothing for GPU.