This is a “public service announcement” for anyone playing with the IEEE VisWeek 2011 Vis Contest dataset we mentioned here. After a few days of patiently waiting for one of the four three massive 30-40GB datasets to download, I managed to finish it. So some notes for anyone interested:
I used the SAS dataset, a 32GB Tarball that expands to 143G on disk.
ParaView will load the data just fine. Used 3.6.2. Took up less than 2GB of Ram to create the image shown above.
The files are ASCII. I saved them as VTM’s (Binary) using ParaView, and the result is 500Meg on disk.
Enjoy. If you come up with any other useful information, feel free to send it to me or put it in the comments.
Wanted to go to GTC but couldn’t? Never fret, NVidia comes to your rescue with just about every single presentation, keynote, and breakout available online for Download or Streaming. Get the PDF’s, the Videos, and more at this massive page on NVidia’s site.
Just hit up www.nvidia.com/gtc2010-content and let the knowledge wash over you, as the 300 hours of content fries your brain.
G327.1-1.1 is the aftermath of a massive star that exploded as a supernova in the Milky Way galaxy. A highly magnetic, rapidly spinning neutron star called a pulsar was left behind after the explosion and is producing a wind of relativistic particles, seen in X-rays by Chandra and XMM-Newton as well as in radio data. This structure is called a pulsar wind nebula. No clear explanation is yet known for the unusual shape of this supernova remnant. One possibility is that we are seeing the effects of a shock wave bouncing backwards off of the shell of material swept up by the blast wave. The X-ray observations allow scientists to estimate the energy released during the supernova explosion and the age of the remnant, as well as the amount of material being swept up as the blast wave from the explosion expands.
For the last couple of months, few stories have grasp people’s attention as much as the Chilean miners rescue, and The Telegraph made a nice graphic summing up the situation, as the drama comes close to an end. Today’s selection moves on to America: first, Mint‘s lookout at the rising of Poverty in the country, then Focus takes on the most underrated jobs, Credit Score shows us the history of Credit Card Rates and APRs, and the last one its Fee Fighters explanation to what happens when a credit card is swiped.
Mihai Panait has a new video tutorial online showing the creation of a melting teapot with FumeFX, 3dsMax2010, and Final Render.
In this tutorial, I’ll try to simulate the melting of a teapot, using Fume FX. This demonstrates the usage of texture maps as a fuel generator in Fume FX. Please note that this scene is modeled in 3DSMax 2010 so you will need this version of the software to open the project files. Anyway if you follow the tutorial you can complete it in any previous version of the software.
Update 10/13 - Sorry folks, looks like the author disabled Embed on this tutorial. Go watch it over on Vimeo at FumeFX 04 – Melting Teapot
UC Berkeley’s tele-immersion lab is the focus of a new video on ZDNet, where they demonstrate some of their real-time scanning systems for remote teleimmersion.
New tele-immersive technologies could be the future of video conferencing. The technology allows users to share a 3D environment with other individuals from a remote location. SmartPlanet talks to University of California at Berkeley’s Gregorij Kurillo about how the system is being used to create virtual spaces for users to interact and manipulate 3D objects.
We discussed Tippet’s work on the new Twilight Eclipse film a while ago, but a new press release from NVidia uncovers another neat trick as to how they creating the giant hairy wolves: They upgraded over 200 workstations from GeForce’s to Quadro’s.
“Making the transition from GeForce to Quadro has had a huge impact,” said Tippett CTO, Sanjay Das, “Not only on existing project work, but also in looking toward the future as we explore GPU accelerated rendering and the options presented by the outcropping of new high-end VFX tools that take advantage of Quadro GPUs.”
“The types of problems visual effects studios are trying to solve are examples of computational visualization – the merging of physical simulation and advanced rendering,” said Dominick Spina, technology product manager, Digital Film Group, NVIDIA. “Tippett’s internal pipeline tool ‘Furator,’ in particular, stands to see orders of magnitude improvement in performance from our Fermi-class Quadro solutions based on our NVIDIA CUDA architecture, which are designed specifically to take complex algorithms and make them interactive.”
At the recent UK Visual Analytics Summer School (VASS) at Middlesex University, Simon Buckingham Shum gave a presentation on several various aspects of visualization, and managed to post most of the content on his website.
I drew on the pioneering work of two people in my talk, Bob Horn and Tim van Gelder: Bob Horn from Stanford, developer of the Turing Test Great Debate Maps, was actually able to join the event on Friday thanks to fortuitous travel to UK, and it was great to see him present some of the latest work he has been doing with his large scale information murals visually synthesising outcomes of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development backcast analysis to a sustainable 2050 as a Pathway Mural:
Use of visualization methods in computer security is becoming more common, and over on the KerMode.info forums, one user wrote a clever little app to visualize the various types of memory pages on a Windows machine.
MemMAP is a tool inspired by j00ru’s KernelMAP (see here). I’ve written my own version with a couple more interesting features. A list follows:
* More memory types included (kernel thread stacks and GDI objects)
* Ability to visualize the memory of a user-mode process
Sources are pointing to a newly granted patent available at the USPTO website entitled “Accelerated Video Encoding Using a Graphics Processing Unit“, granted to Microsoft, that seems to cover not only GPU video encoding but motion estimation as well.
The systems and methods described herein are directed at accelerating video encoding using a graphics processing unit. In one aspect, a video encoding system uses both a central processing unit (CPU) and a graphics processing unit (GPU) to perform video encoding. The system implements a technique that enables the GPU to perform motion estimation for video encoding. The technique allows the GPU to perform a motion estimation process in parallel with the video encoding process performed by the CPU. The performance of video encoding using such a system is greatly accelerated as compared to encoding using just the CPU.
In another aspect, data related to motion estimation is arranged and provided to the GPU in a way that utilizes the capabilities of the GPU. Data about video frames may be collocated to enable multiple channels of the GPU to process tasks in parallel. The depth buffer of the GPU may be used to consolidate repeated calculations and searching tasks during the motion estimation process. The use of frame collocation and depth buffer enables the GPU to be better utilized and to further accelerate video encoding.
This is a potentially damning patent for the industry, as companies like Adobe,NVidia, Cinnafilm and others have been releasing GPGPU-accelerated encoding systems for the last few years. Now Microsoft has the means to crush them all under patent violations.
So now’s the time, people, to start digging for Prior Art. Microsoft applied for this in 2004. Anyone know of any GPU-accelerated video encoders before then?
This is a “public service announcement” for anyone playing with the IEEE VisWeek 2011 Vis Contest dataset we mentioned here. After a few days of patiently waiting for one of the four three massive 30-40GB datasets to download, I managed to finish it. So some notes for anyone interested:
Wanted to go to GTC but couldn’t? Never fret, NVidia comes to your rescue with just about every single presentation, keynote, and breakout available online for Download or Streaming. Get the PDF’s, the Videos, and more at this massive page on NVidia’s site.
For the last couple of months, few stories have grasp people’s attention as much as the Chilean miners rescue, and 
Mihai Panait has a new video tutorial online showing the creation of a melting teapot with FumeFX, 3dsMax2010, and Final Render.
UC Berkeley’s tele-immersion lab is the focus of a new video on ZDNet, where they demonstrate some of their real-time scanning systems for remote teleimmersion.
We discussed Tippet’s work on the new Twilight Eclipse film 
At the recent UK Visual Analytics Summer School (VASS) at Middlesex University, Simon Buckingham Shum gave a presentation on several various aspects of visualization, and managed to post most of the content on his website.
VizWorld.com 
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