VizWorld.com

Fans of CEI’s EnSight have a lot to look forward to thanks to a new point release of the popular commercial visualization and analysis tool.  In addition to several bugfixes and minor optimizations, they’ve added several huge features worthy of a major revision:

• A new ANSYS Results Reader
• Support for ABAQUS 6.10
• New functions for network license controls
• Volume Rendering is now available in EnSight DR

And many many more, read the release notes for all the gory details.  The Volume Rendering addition is probably the biggest, and takes their newest feature to the extreme scalability of HPC platforms.

CEI – Creators of EnSight Visualization Software – EnSight 9.1.2a Release Notes | Releases.

Science cei, ensight, software

Another week ending, and the world will finally meet it’s new soccer World Champion. However, one country that, despite it’s sports tradition, hasn’t been much of a success in soccer is China, as seen on the infographic from Chinfographics. Another interesting piece comes from Onlinepoker, about the skills – or luck – needed to be a master in Poker. Flowingdata brings an insight on a startup’s typical business cycle, while Credit Loan gives us a closer look at the U.S. Tax refunds. Last, but not least, a great piece by WorkUp on the environmental cost of spam.

China’s Football Position and History in World Cup

Poker: Luck vs Skill

Startup business cycle flowchart

A Closer Look At Your Tax Return

The Cost of Spam: C02 Emissions

And our daily video pick:

The Clothing Business

A great weekend for all of you, and don’t forget to check Visual Loop‘s 24/7 infographics stream.

Graphics, Science design, infographic, Visual Loop, visualizations

Earth’s Atmosphere Top to Bottom (Giant)

Infographic: The bad and the ugly of boating accidents

Transparency: Veterans Charged with Murder

Graphics, Science digest, infographics, list

The Wall Street Journal takes a good look at how 3D TV is performing in the home, only 2% of homes according to the Consumer Electronics Association with only 4% projected for next year, and wonders if it’s even worth getting into?  Television doesn’t have the captive audience of theaters, with people frequently multitasking TV with reading the mail, surfing the net, or folding laundry.  Perhaps some of the folks in the movie industry need to talk to folks in the TV industry for a nice wake-up call, like this comment from Alan Wurtzel at NBC Universal.

“Just because we can do it doesn’t mean the audience wants it,” says Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC Universal. He compares 3-D to previous technological flops like TV sets in cars and built into stoves so cooking housewives can watch while cooking.

Then, there’s the nauseating comments like this from Panasonic’s VP of Technology & Government Affairs Peter Fannon:

The companies believe that as 3-D TV becomes mainstream, not only will glasses work with every brand, but opticians will offer prescription models and fashion designers will create high-end, branded eyewear. Chanel 3-D glasses, Panasonic’s Mr. Fannon says, “would make great stocking stuffers.”

And this statement:

So far, some companies feel they have more to gain than others. Sports and nature-show purveyors are exploring the technology, along with cable operators who see the potential for added fees from subscribers, including pay-per-view movies and special events.

So there you have it.. It’s got nothing to do with “improving the experience”, but rather “gouging the consumer out of every penny”.

via Is 3-D TV For Real? – WSJ.com.

Graphics, Hardware 3d, stereoscopic, television

I just stumbled across a tool called ‘MeVisLab’, just recently at version 2.1, that offers a GUI-based development environment for medical image processing and visualization in a variety of ways.

MeVisLab represents a powerful, modular framework for the development of image processing algorithms and visualization and interaction methods, with a special focus on medical imaging.

Besides basic image processing and visualization modules, MeVisLab includes advanced medical imaging algorithms for segmentation, registration, and quantitative morphological and functional image analysis.

It seems very pipeline oriented, allowing you to match various filter and segmentation algorithms together to achieve a wide spectrum of results.  Perhaps most impressively, the entire software is freely available from their website compiled with a variety of compilers, making it available to extend with plugins developed in just about any modern environment.

via MeVisLab – About MeVisLab.

Science biomed, software

A great tutorial over at Tuts+ covers the process of compositing V-Ray renderlayers into a final image.  Much more comprehensive than simply stacking the layers, they get into several post-production techniques that realy make the image pop.

In this tutorial Ahmed Fathi takes a look at how to composite together V-ray render layers using blending-modes and masks in Photoshop. Once completed, this process allows you to change or tweak any aspect of your image in seconds without having to re-render a thing! Ahmed also covers a few extra post production techniques such as Chromatic Aberration and Depth Of Field, as well as how to emulate a Cross-processed look.

via Compositing V-ray Render Layers in Photoshop | Cgtuts+.

Graphics tutorial.photoshop, vray

Earth’s Atmosphere Top to Bottom | Atmosphere Layers | Atmospheric Pressure | Infographic.

infographics

Our own Tiago Veloso has a great article up at InspiredMag where he catalogs some of the infographics and charts floating around the internet of BP’s disastrous Gulf Oil Spill.

It’s been almost three months since the Deepwater Horizon disaster occurred, in the Mexican Gulf. Arguably, the most horrifying man-made environmental catastrophe of all times, it has been illustrated all over the world in magazines, newspapers and websites.

Contrarily to my last post here on Inspired Magazine, this one is not filled with joy and good expectations, typical of a big sports fan like I am. Today, we’ll see how information design can also show the less enjoyable side of our life, and how powerful it can be unveiling the cruel facts behind such tragedies as this one.

Some of them we’ve covered before, but several of them are new.

via +50 Ways of Visualizing BP’s Dark Mess | Inspired Magazine.

Graphics list, oil

Infographic: The bad and the ugly of boating accidents | Gadling.com.

infographics

ACM has published the SC10 Technical Program, and no surprise there’s a decent amount of Visualization and OpenCL stuff on the schedule.  A few to take a closer look at :

• 2010 Workshop on Ultrascale Visualization
• Elastic-R: A virtual Collaborative Environment for Scientific Computing & Data Analysis in the Cloud (Based on R & Scilab).
• Visit: Introduction and Advanced
• OpenCL: Introduction and Advanced
• Using 3.5D Blocking Optimization for Stencil Computations on Modern CPUs and GPUs
• An 80-fold Speedup, 15 TFlops, Full GPU Acceleration of Non-Hydrostatic Weather Model ASUCA Production Code
• An Adaptive Framework for Simulation & Online Remote Visualization of Critical Climate Applications in Resource-Constrained Environments
• OpenMPC: Extended OpenMP Programming and Tuning for GPUs
• Toward Exascale Computing with Heterogeneous Architectures
• Scaling Hierarchical N-Body Simulations on GPU Clusters
• Size Matters: Space/Time Tradeoffs to Improve GPGPU Applications Performance
• Parallelizing the QUDA Library for Multi-GPU Calculations in Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics
• Adapting Partial Cache Coherence Hardware to Reduce Off-Chip Memory Traffic with Non-Coherent Caches in GPUs

That’s all the ones explicitly tied to visualization and GPU’s, although there are dozens about ‘MultiCore” and “Heterogeneous Architectures”, which are frequently code words for discussions about GPU’s in HPC.

SC10.

Science conference, sc10