China has just brought a new supercomputer online that looks like it could unseat both ORNL’s Jaguar and China’s own Nebulae machines from their rankings amongst the top of the Top500. The new ‘Tianhe-1A’ pulls together 7,168 Tesla M2060′s with 14,336 CPU’s to delivery 2.507 Petaflops in LINPACK, for only 4 Megawatts of power.
“The performance and efficiency of Tianhe-1A was simply not possible without GPUs,” said Guangming Liu, chief of National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin. “The scientific research that is now possible with a system of this scale is almost without limits; we could not be more pleased with the results.”
While the release doesn’t state, I’m relatively certain that number is the rMax figure, meaning the Peak performance, not the sustained performance. The current Rmax for ORNL’s Jaguar is only 2.3PetaFlop, while Nebulae clocks in an impressive 2.9Petaflops. Either way, we shouldn’t have to wait long for the next Top500 list (probably just a week or two) and see how things shake out in the new list.
Update 10/28 9am: I just got confirmation that the 2.507 PetaFlop number is the real sustained LINPACK performance number, easily making Tianhe-1A the #1 system in relation to the last Top500 list. Now we just have to see if Jaguar has had some upgrades in the last 6 months. However, getting them from 1.75PF to 2.5PF would take some major upgrades.
Randy Krum has a new infographic on his site cataloging the history of everyone’s favorite October holiday Halloween.
I designed this one mainly focused on the historical foundation of Halloween. I’m sure a completely separate timeline could be made just covering the last 100 years of commercializing Halloween, but I tried to stay away from most of that with this one.
Go check out the full-res version on his site via the link below.
On interesting topic at IEEE VisWeek is in the classic map legend. A standby of all visualizations, maybe it’s time to revamp it for something new. Work from Jason Dykes, Jo Wood, and Aidan Slingsby does just that with some interesting interactive legends.
This design paper presents new guidance for creating map legends in a dynamic environment. Our contribution is a set of guidelines for legend design in a visualization context and a series of illustrative themes through which they may be expressed. These are demonstrated in an applications context through interactive software prototypes. The guidelines are derived from cartographic literature and in liaison with EDINA who provide digital mapping services for UK tertiary education. They enhance approaches to legend design that have evolved for static media with visualization by considering: selection, layout, symbols, position, dynamism and design and process. Broad visualization legend themes include: The Ground Truth Legend, The Legend as Statistical Graphic and The Map is the Legend. Together, these concepts enable us to augment legends with dynamic properties that address specific needs, rethink their nature and role and contribute to a wider re-evaluation of maps as artifacts of usage rather than statements of fact.
It’s not really news anymore that Adobe CS5 Premiere makes good use of NVidia CUDA for acceleration, but you may be surprised that it’s good enough to convince a show like Tikibot to switch from Final Cut to Premiere for their work in Salt.
“We’re primarily a PC based shop, with a pipeline designed for budget-minded productions,” said Jackson. “We had been using Final Cut, but when Adobe released CS5 with NVIDIA CUDA GPU acceleration of Premiere Pro we got really interested in moving to Premiere. Faster playback is important for VFX editing as we are constantly updating new versions to the edit and shifting timelines.”
In addition to just accelerating Premiere Pro, it accelerated their inhouse tool ‘Studiopass’ to enable 1080p rendering for reviews.
First we showed you how you could modify actors in live video with MovieReshape, now we can dynamically regenerate their clothing as well thanks to work by Carsten Stoll of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. They’ve generated 3D laser scans of actors in costume and motion-tracked the silhouette and skeletons. Then analyzed the cloth and can map it onto newly detected skeletons in new video, allowing them to change clothes.
According to Stoll, the results are extremely realistic. When he and his team showed 52 people a video of a woman dancing in a skirt alongside a reconstruction that his software had produced, the majority of viewers said that the reconstruction was “almost the same” as the original.
They talk a lot about using it in Video Games, but I believe the technology would probably first be used in VFX. In fact, they’ve got Andy Lomax at The Foundry looking at it right now.
“This is exactly what people like me want,” says Andy Lomas, a software developer who produced digital effects for the film The Matrix and is based at computer graphics firm The Foundry in London. “I want to be able to capture the fundamental nature of an actor’s clothing, but also have the freedom to change the way he or she moves.”
This technology will be unveiled at SIGGRAPH Asia.
Chainsaw, a post-production services company for television, film, and other media, has just expanded into VFX with the hiring of Print Focus VFX Supervisor Boyd Stepan.
“We want to offer our clients the ability to take care of all of their post production needs within one workflow, both for the sake of efficiency and to ensure greater creative control,” said Chainsaw co-founder and Emmy-winning editor Bill DeRonde. “Boyd’s arrival brings us a step closer to that goal. He is a very talented and experienced artist who can help us build a visual effects department capable of delivering the quality our clients expect from Chainsaw.”
They’ve built an entire VFX suite equipped with Autode Flame workstations and Autodesk stereoscopic 3d Tools.
Professor Mike Batty from University College London has a new visualization method called ‘Rank Clocks’ which plot data radially out from the center, showing the change over time.
A rank clock is a device for visualising the changes over time in the ranked order of any set of objects where the ordering is usually from large to small. The size of cities, of firms, the distribution of incomes, and such-like social and economic phenomena display highly ordered distributions. If you rank order these phenomena by size from largest to smallest, the objects follow a power law over much of their size range, or at least follow a log normal distribution which is a power law in the upper tail.
Looks interesting, and the individual plots show the variation over time quite well.
The Blue Sky Disney blog is reporting the George Lucas is not content with just having the Star Wars Trilogy released in 3-D. Lucas also wants to release the Indiana Jones series in 3-D as well. The first and the third movies I would buy, but do not expect me to ever buy numbers two and four.
Next month, Lucasfilm will announce that they’re converting the Indiana Jones Saga to 3D as well. The films will be converted and released in a similar fashion as the Star Wars films with “Raiders of the Lost Ark” the first out of the gate.
Lucas has been bitten by the 3D bug since “Avatar” showed the possible/promise of the technology, so other parts of the Lucasfilm catalog could be on the horizon as well…
Yesterday we showed you a video showing the globular cluster Omega Centauri, and answering the question as to whether or not a black hole was at its center. Today we look at what happens if you took that same data, and plotted it as a scatter graph of stars. On the X-axis of the scatter graph we have a stars temperature . On the Y-axis of the scatter graph we have a stars intrinsic brightness. This is called a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. When applied to the globular cluster Omega Centauri, you can see some interesting things.
In this video, the stars in globular cluster Omega Centauri are rearranged according to their intrinsic brightness (vertical axis) and their temperature (horizontal axis). The temperature of a star dictates its apparent colour, with cooler stars being red and hotter ones being blue. The majority of stars at any given time fall into a wide band known as the main sequence, which passes from the top left (hot, bright stars) to the bottom right (cool, dim stars). However this is just a snapshot in time — as stars evolve they do not stay fixed to one point on the diagram for the whole of their lives.
Credit:
NASA, ESA, J. Anderson and R. van der Marel (STScI)
We have a very assorted round-up today, covering several issues. Halloween is almost here, and Savings just released a new infographic about it. Still far, but already making a fuzz are the 2012 Olympics, and the folks at The Missing Graph shows us some of the Ticket Prices for those who want to make plans to attend. After that, we move to Fixr comparison on the Presidential wadges around the world, and to close this up, an amazing Twitter Infographic, by Melanie Stirner, and Radiology Technician Schools selection of facts about Cancer.
China has just brought a new supercomputer online that looks like it could unseat both ORNL’s Jaguar and China’s own Nebulae machines from their rankings amongst the top of the Top500. The new ‘Tianhe-1A’ pulls together 7,168 Tesla M2060′s with 14,336 CPU’s to delivery 2.507 Petaflops in LINPACK, for only 4 Megawatts of power.
On interesting topic at IEEE VisWeek is in the classic map legend. A standby of all visualizations, maybe it’s time to revamp it for something new. Work from Jason Dykes, Jo Wood, and Aidan Slingsby does just that with some interesting interactive legends.
It’s not really news anymore that Adobe CS5 Premiere makes good use of NVidia CUDA for acceleration, but you may be surprised that it’s good enough to convince a show like Tikibot to switch from Final Cut to Premiere for their work in Salt.
First we showed you how you could 
Chainsaw, a post-production services company for television, film, and other media, has just expanded into VFX with the hiring of Print Focus VFX Supervisor Boyd Stepan.
Professor Mike Batty from University College London has a new visualization method called ‘Rank Clocks’ which plot data radially out from the center, showing the change over time.
We have a very assorted round-up today, covering several issues. Halloween is almost here, and 
VizWorld.com 
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