Viz Scientists, warm your computers, because IEEE VisWeek has published the 2011 Visualization Contest. Yes, I said the 2011 contest, and they haven’t even had VisWeek2010 yet.
The Vis Contest 2011 targets the field of fluid dynamics. The goal is to devise a visualization that allows for exploring the stability of a fluid dynamics simulation of a pump with respect to different models of its turbulences. One big challenge is the large amount of the data.
The contest aims at demonstrating how novel visualization and interaction techniques from the fore-front of scientific research can help to solve real-world problems of high relevance – today.
The 2011 contest is sponsored by CEI and others, so no surprise that the data is available in EnSight format. The datasets are pretty big, so you may want to start your downloads now (three datasets, ranging from 30Gig to 40Gig each). I’m trying to download them now, but the bandwidth is pretty limited. I’m looking at 30 hours to download right now. BitTorrent anyone?
Even the prize is beefed up this year. If you win, not only will you get the accolades and praise of your peers, but you’ll get a brand new Apple iPad, courtesy of CEI..
We have set up a second download server (http://viscontest.cs.unc.edu/) which also includes the individual time slices from the original files, repackaged and re-compressed, so that they can be downloaded one step at a time if desired. You may use the “wget” program to pull the files over.