turing-surface-cache#

Reaction-diffusion systems (Turing patterns) on curved closed surfaces, evaluated at a chosen end time, with the solutions shared between all visitors through a cloud cache.

This is a trimmed fork of turing-surface, which solves the same systems live and freely tunable. What this app changes is the contract: every setting is a choice from a short list, so each combination of choices names exactly one solution. Solutions already in the shared cache load by themselves as the choices are browsed; a combination nobody has computed shows empty surfaces, and nothing runs until the user presses Compute solution, which runs the solver locally (in the browser, on WebGPU), watching the pattern form and stopping at exactly the requested time. Users who hold an upload API key contribute their locally-computed solutions back, so the next visitor who asks for the same combination gets it in a second rather than a minute.

The discrete parameter space#

Three models ship, all in turing-surface's 6-transform flux form — Schnakenberg (the default), Brusselator, and Allen–Cahn — on three geometries (sphere, ellipsoid, peanut). The Algorithm-4 reference variant is deliberately absent: it solves the same equations as Schnakenberg and would only duplicate cache entries under different hashes. The choices, defined in src/cache/options.ts:

The model, unlike every other choice, is compiled into the GPU session, so switching it pays a recompile of a second or two; everything else swaps into the running session. Allen–Cahn evolves one species, so it shows one panel where the others show two.

(Defaults in bold.) The numerical-scheme settings are fixed — lmax 63, 8 solve iterations, seed wavelength λ = 0.5 — but are recorded in every cache key, so offering them as choices later invalidates nothing.

The whole selection is mirrored into the URL fragment, every value written explicitly, so reloading returns to the same combination and a shared link opens on the same spec (and, when cached, the same solution) for whoever follows it. A "Reset to defaults" button puts every choice back.

Every end time is an exact multiple of every dt, so a run to T = 800 passes exactly through t = 100, 200 and 400. Those intermediate states are captured as the run passes them and, for an uploading user, encoded and uploaded in the background while the run continues: one long run populates four cache entries, and the earlier ones are already shared before the run finishes. The same structure works in the other direction: the state is Markovian in the spectral coefficients, so before computing anything the app looks for the longest cached shorter run of the same spec and continues from its final state, computing only the remainder. Asking for T = 1600 when T = 800 is cached costs half the run, and the t = 0 initial state travels inside every file of the chain, so a continuation writes files identical in kind to a from-scratch run.

How the cache works#

The page's whole state is one small spec object (model, parameters, geometry, seed, end time, scheme settings, plus the app name and a format version). Its canonical JSON — keys sorted at every level — is hashed with SHA-256, and the hash is the object name:

https://tempory.net/tmpbucket/turing-surface-cache/v1/schnakenberg/<sha256>.h5

A lookup is therefore a single GET with no index or API, and a 404 means a miss. The path carries the app name, format version and model in the clear so that future cleanup (lifecycle rules, prefix deletes) never has to open a file to know what it belongs to; the hash input includes the version string, so a format change moves every object rather than silently colliding with the old ones.

Filling the cache#

A cache only pays off once it holds what people ask for, and nobody wants to sit through the first computation of every combination. Auto-fill the cache — offered only when an upload API key is present — turns an otherwise idle machine into a contributor: it works through the parameter space, skipping whatever is already cached and computing and uploading the rest, and runs until stopped.

Two decisions make that practical. The first is the order. About 8,400 combinations exist (228 model-parameter sets × 37 geometries, with the seed and dt pinned), which is roughly three GPU-weeks at this repo's ~180 steps/s — exhaustible in principle, but only if the useful part comes first. Since a visitor starts at the defaults and changes one dropdown at a time, the chance that a combination is ever requested falls off steeply with the number of knobs that differ from the defaults, so the walk proceeds by that distance: every one-knob deviation before any two-knob one. One machine overnight covers every one- and two-knob deviation from every model's defaults, which is most of what anyone will ever click; the long tail can take as long as it likes.

The second is that within a distance the order is random, and that is the entire coordination mechanism. Several idle browsers walking the same tiers in different orders, each skipping what it finds already cached, rarely duplicate each other and need no coordinator, no work queue, and no knowledge of one another. A skip costs one HEAD request, so a machine joining a well-filled region catches up in seconds.

The seed and dt are pinned rather than surveyed (seed 1, dt 0.05): a seed picks a draw and means nothing on its own, and dt is a numerical knob rather than a property of the problem, so surveying either would multiply the work without adding a solution anyone asked for. Both are the default of every model, so an auto-filled entry is exactly what a visitor arriving at the defaults requests. Two smaller points: the walk skips the ellipsoid with all axes 1, since that is the unit sphere and the sphere geometry already covers it, and any run whose state goes non-finite is reported and discarded rather than uploaded — an unattended walk must not publish wreckage under a hash someone later trusts.

Because it is meant to run unattended, the compute loop never waits on an animation frame and skips rendering entirely while the page is hidden, so a minimized window or a background tab keeps computing at full speed rather than being throttled to a crawl.

Uploads go through the tmpbucket Worker: the client presents the API key and a file name, receives a presigned R2 PUT URL, and uploads directly. Only holders of the key can write; everyone can read. The key is entered in the page and kept in localStorage.

Filling it from the command line#

A browser window is a poor place to leave a long computation, so the same walk runs outside one:

TURING_SURFACE_CACHE_KEY=… npx https://concept-collection.github.io/turing-surface-cache/fill.tgz

Nothing is published to the npm registry — npm installs a tarball from a URL as happily as from a package name, and the tarball is built and deployed beside the page, so the command line is always the same commit as the app. The page itself offers this command, ready to copy, once an upload key is entered; the key is masked in what the page shows and real in what it copies, so that pasting it onto a fresh machine takes one step while a screenshot of the page still gives nothing away. The key can also be saved for later runs (login prompts for it and writes ~/.config/turing-surface-cache/key), or passed as --key, though the environment is preferable: a key on the command line is visible to every user on the machine through ps, while another process's environment is not.

Node 18 or newer is required — the cache keys are SHA-256 through WebCrypto, which older node does not have as a global, and node 18 itself has it only under node:crypto, which is worth supporting since that is what several current distributions ship. An older node than that cannot even parse the bundle, and would otherwise report a syntax error pointing at a brace, so the published command is a small ES5 launcher that checks the version first and says what to do about it.

One consequence of installing from a URL is worth knowing. npx keys its install directory on the whole spec string it was given, so a URL that never changes keeps running whatever it first installed, however often the file behind it has been replaced — and neither --prefer-online nor a changed version in the manifest makes any difference, since nothing remote is consulted once that directory exists. The command the page offers therefore carries the build it belongs to (fill.tgz?v=<commit>), which makes every deployment a new spec and so a fresh install. The bare URL above is right the first time and stale ever after; --help says which build is running.

The walk, the runs and the uploads are the page's own — the same modules under src/cache/, driven by console output instead of a status bar (see src/cli/fill.ts). What differs is the WebGPU: node has none, so the command line brings its own, the optional webgpu package of prebuilt Google Dawn binaries, installed under the globals the transform code expects. Dawn reaches the GPU through Vulkan on Linux and Windows and Metal on macOS, so a machine wanting to contribute needs a GPU and its driver — on a machine without one, Dawn either finds no adapter at all or falls back to a software rasterizer, which is roughly a thousand times slower and worth nothing to anybody. The command names its adapter on startup, reports its rate in steps per second, and says so plainly when either looks wrong; it does not refuse to run, since the judgment is the operator's.

A machine can also be too old for the command in a way that has nothing to do with its GPU. Dawn's prebuilt binary wants glibc 2.34, which a long-lived Linux workstation may well not have — Rocky and RHEL 8 are on 2.28 — and the obvious remedy of running the command in a container turns out not to work: inside one the NVIDIA driver declines to bring up its Vulkan driver (vk_icdNegotiateLoaderICDInterfaceVersion returns VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED), while the same call on the host succeeds. What does work is to borrow only the userland from a container image and run node through its loader, on the host, leaving the GPU, /dev and /proc exactly as they were; the host's own /usr/lib64 stays last on the library path, since the NVIDIA libraries and the Vulkan loader have to match the running kernel module. The page carries that recipe, folded away beside the command it belongs to, along with what the other common failures mean — they are worth writing down where someone will meet them, since none of them is guessable from the error alone.

Progress is a line per target and a rate that updates in place:

[2] schnakenberg a=0.15 b=0.9 D1=4e-4 D2=8e-3 dt=0.05 · sphere · 2 knobs from the defaults
      computing to t = 1600 (32,000 steps)
      t = 812.4 / 1600  51%  184 steps/s  eta 1m11s  uploaded 3/3
      computed in 2m54s — uploaded 5 solutions (t = 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600)

When the output is not a terminal the same lines are written periodically instead of in place, so a nohuped log stays readable. --dry-run lists the first targets and whether each is already cached, which is a cheap way to see what a machine would take on before committing it; --limit and --model narrow the work; and ctrl-C stops after the current run, so nothing in flight is lost.

The cache file#

Cache files are HDF5, written in the browser with h5wasm and readable from Python with h5py. The layout is turing-surface's reference-file layout (see docs/ellipsoid-reference-spec.md there) extended with the cache's identity at the root, so a cache file is also a valid reference file — it can be loaded straight into turing-surface's "Compare against uploaded data" mode:

/            attrs: app, format_version, spec_json, model, species,
                    created_utc, adapter
├─ backend/  attrs: adapter, runtime, precision
├─ spec/     attrs: geometry, lmax, seed, steps, niter, lam3, t_end
│  ├─ params/           attrs: a, b, D1, D2, dt
│  └─ geometry_params/  attrs: the geometry's params
├─ grid/     attrs: lmax, mmax, nlat, nphi, nlm
├─ geometry/ Gx, Gy, Gz                     float32[2·nlm]
├─ initial/  U, V (spectral state at t = 0) float32[2·nlm]
└─ final/    U, V (at the end time)         float32[2·nlm]

spec_json is the exact string that was hashed into the object name, and the reader verifies it matches what was asked for. The initial state is included so a file fully defines its run; the coefficients are the spherical-harmonic convention documented in turing-surface (orthonormal + Condon-Shortley, m-major, [re, im] interleaved). At lmax 63 a file is about 90 KB.

Note that the solver is deterministic given the spec only to fp32 round-off: different GPUs round differently, so a cached solution and a local recompute agree closely but not bit-for-bit. The cache stores whichever trusted user computed a combination first, and the file records which adapter that was.

Development#

npm install
npm run dev       # local dev server
npm run build     # type-check + production build to dist/
npm run build:cli # the command-line bundle, packed as dist/fill.tgz

npm run build runs build:cli too, so a deployment carries both. The command-line bundle is an SSR vite build of src/cli/fill.ts with everything under src/ and numbl's compiler bundled in, exactly as the page's build has them; the only things left external are h5wasm, whose node build reads its wasm off disk, and Dawn, which is a native addon. scripts/pack-cli.mjs writes the published manifest, which therefore depends on neither numbl nor a checkout of anything.

numbl is a local file:../../numbl dependency, exactly as in turing-surface — a sibling checkout of numbl is required, reached through the numbl-src alias in vite.config.ts. See turing-surface's README for the details; nothing about the arrangement changed here.

Checks:

• node scripts/check-app.mjs — end-to-end in headless Chrome (SwiftShader WebGPU) with the cloud cache mocked: a miss computes locally and produces the .h5 (verified with h5py), a fresh page loads that .h5 as a hit, and a third page asking for a longer end time warm-starts from it. The pages use the ?tend= query hook, which substitutes short test end times for the UI's list. This is what CI runs.
• node scripts/check-live.mjs [url] — smoke-check a deployed URL against the real cache.
• node scripts/screenshot.mjs out.png [light|dark] [tEnd] — screenshot after the boot-time solve.

Deployed to GitHub Pages by .github/workflows/deploy.yml on push to main.

License#

CECILL-2.1 (inherited from SHTNS via shtns-webgpu, whose sources are vendored under src/sht/).