The Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI) have been commissioned by the UK Department of Communities and Local Government to review the many approaches to visualizing data in the public realm.  OCSI is a research group focusing on data and evidence to help the public sector develop better services.

Questions asked include:

• What visualisations are being used by the public sector? What can we learn from elsewhere?
• Is there a useful typology (classification) of visualisation techniques for public sector users?
• How effective are particular types of visualisation in supporting public sector research and decision-making?
• What are the most appropriate visualisation techniques for particular purposes?

Contact details for response are on the website.

OCSI – Data visualisation.

Science government, ocsi, survey

RayFire v1.44 is now available. RayFire is a fantastic physics simulation tool for breaking, exploding, and shattering objects within 3D Studio Max.  It support NVidia PhysX and several special effects for muzzle and impact flashes.

RayFire Tool – Shoot, Break, Explode..

Graphics 3dsmax, physx, rayfire

Jiri Adamec has a project overview of a scene he created with a combination of 3D Studio Max, ZBrush, and Photoshop.

Warning: NSFW.

3D Total – The cg artists home page.

Graphics example

Global Warming isn’t a new phenomena, if it’s even real (it’s still a hotly contested issue), and maps showing the trends of head and water currents have been around for centuries.  Over at the GlobalWarmingArt website they’ve got a nice collection of maps showing several effects believed to be related to Global Warmimg, with information on the source data and algorithms used.

Category:Maps – Global Warming Art.

Science maps, weather

As NVidia continues to dump more research and money into products like Tesla, analysts are doing more digging into just how much money is to be made in GPGPU computing.  So far, the numbers look good.

Analyst Patrick Newton with Stifel Nicolaus & Co. estimates that Tesla could account for $100 million in Nvidia s revenue in the current fiscal year. The company had total revenue of $3.4 billion for the fiscal year ended in January. “Tesla has the potential to be a very important long-term driver for Nvidia ” Newton said. “They have a very well-thought-out and targeted strategy.” Nvidia it should be noted lost $30 million last year in the face of growing competition and some consumer product miscues. That compared with a profit of $797 million in the previous year. The company projects that its potential market for Tesla could approach 40 to 50 percent of the high-performance computing market which amounts to $4 billion to $6 billion in annual revenue.

via Nvidia’s graphic chips moving into high-end computing arena.

Hardware cuda, nvidia, tesla

Just a few days remain in Rackable’s 25-day wait for acquisition of SGI, and while no-one has officially made an offer, it seems that a few of them are considering it.  John West over at InsideHPC has pulled some strings and gotten the scoop on a few vendors, including one very interesting possibility:

HP: Although HP and IBM dominate the Top500, HP hasn’t had a strong presence in the top 10 for a while. SGI’s R&D in HPC could reinvigorate their offering. HP has a market cap of just about $85B right now, with $10B of cash and equivalents on hand. [Update: Readers have also pointed out that HP is the only other large-scale Itanium vendor in the US.  Buying SGI would be a consolidation of technology and talent surrounding the
platform.]

An HP-SGI consolidation would be an interesting one.  While they both do alot of work with Itanium, Itanium simply hasn’t “taken off” as the CPU of choice in HPC.  HP does, however, seem to have the money if it wanted.  Their Q1`09 statement shows a $28.8B profit and $100B in assets, along with a  $1B Net gain in Cash.

Update: Just got word from a reputable source that the SGI Auction closes today at 5pm Eastern. So we should be hearing something soon one way or another.

Update: Rumors are circling about the Results of the Auction.

InsideTrack: rumors of other bidders for SGI [Updated] | insideHPC.com.

Hardware hp, sgi

Shortly after I published my SGI Special Edition Podcast, I was contacted by a former SGI Engineer (who preferred to remain Anonymous) with several stories to tell of what happened to SGI. It’s an amazing story full of minor hardware glitches that wound up costing millions, bone-headed oversights during acquisitions, and basic mismanagement of a billion dollar company. The story is far too long and involved for a single post, so I’ll be adding it in chapters over the next few days. So come on inside and witness the saga of what really happened to SGI over the years.. The story has never been told, until now. We’ll begin at the Top:

Chapter 1: Management

Chapter 2: The Acquisitions

Read more…

Graphics, Hardware, Science feature, sgi, sgi-bts

NVidia has just released a pair of new extensions for OpenGL called “Bindless Graphics”.

Bindless Graphics are changes to OpenGL that can enable close to an order of magnitude improvement in the CPU-limitedness of graphics applications. Recent improvements in programmability have focused on additional flexibility in shaders (expanding formats to include more float and integer types, better branching support, etc.) and enabling new features (geometry programs, transform feedback, etc), and while some of these allow offloading parts of certain workloads to the GPU, they don’t directly attack the issues that dominate CPU time.

You can see a tutorial on the NVidia Developer Zone.

via Official Bindless Graphics feedback thread – OpenGL.org Discussion and Help Forums.

Hardware nvidia, opengl

Sven Sauer and Igor Posavec has a step-by-step of their “Dead Angels” graphic up on CGArena.  They used 3D Studio Max for the base modeling with ZBrush for the detailing, and it’s a great collaboration between a classical artist and digital modeler.

The Illochim (Herbrew: Engel) was here represented as an ancient race out of the depths of space. To create a different view on the misinterpreted creatures, Antoan Simic started first with the rough sketches of the chimera that gave birth to the legends of angels and dragons alike.

Making of Dead Angels – CGArena.

Graphics 3dsmax, example, zbrush

Visual Mining has just released their quarterly reports for the period ending March 31, 2009, and proves that Visualization is not just necessary for businesses, it’s profitable.

• Obtained a monthly average of nearly 300 customer evaluations of NetCharts Performance Dashboards
• Entered 9th year of profitability with 33rd consecutive profitable quarter

via Visual Mining Reports Solid First Quarter.

Science visual mining