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A globular cluster is a spherical collection of stars tightly bound by gravity. The globular cluster Omega Centauri is located approximately 15,800 light-years from Earth. This globular cluster contains several million stars. Some scientist think that a black hold lies at the center of Omega Centauri. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers measured the motions of more than 100,000 of its stars. From this they can predict the motions of the stars some 10,000 years into the future. Does a black hole lie at the center of the Omega Centauri globular cluster? Based on this, astronomers do not think so.

via : Hubble data used to look 10 000 years into the future

Science astronomy, hubble, nasa

HPC provider ‘Steam Engine’ has been making waves recently, with only 3 months under its belt, and most impressively they’ve even managed to rope in some big clients like Rising Sun Pictures who used their resources for the new Harry Potter film.  Of course, paramount when talking about ‘cloud computing’ is security.

“We obviously have concerns about security and we need to be satisfied by what’s offered. We wouldn’t use computers from this random place that we couldn’t see or inspect. Our clients are incredibly security concerned, given the sensitive nature of films in production and the sizable investment at stake,” Clark said.

Fortunately, they overcame security concerns

Stefan Gillard, Steam Engine’s commercial director, said that its HPC model is ideal for film development given that the data is stored in the tier-three-rated Global Switch facility, secured deep within the Harbour MSP datacentre in Sydney.

How do they manage all this computing horsepower?

Rising Sun Pictures runs 300 nodes in its render farm during the day, with an extra 150 available to it at night, as well as the extra grunt provided by Steam Engine, meaning that render jobs go quicker with fewer errors.

“We have a batch computer management system. You give it jobs and finds the best place to run them on our own computers and we then bolt nodes onto our existing render farm. Our program will push data onto the rented nodes as required,” Clark said.

Be sure to read the full article, it’s got lots of great detail on the storage scenario and how they managed to justify the cost.

via Harry Potter effects gurus turn to cloud – Business – News.

Hardware cloud, harry potter, hpc, rising sunk pictures

A cleverly designed research project is underway at VisWeek2010 this year via the ‘Visual Backchannel’ project, sponsored by the University of Calgary and IBM Research.

The purpose of this research is to better understand how a Visual Backchannel interface can help people follow and explore computer-mediated conversations during large events. Visualizing backchannel communication during large- scale events raises questions of distraction and engagement of event participants. Furthermore, the volume of status updates occurring during large events poses system performance challenges with regard to data processing and transmission

The visualization interface is impressive, pulling in what seems to be everything containing the Twitter #visweek hashtag into a fully interactive interface.  They show the most prolific twitterers (With @dr_tj taking the #1 spot), along with pictures, individual tweets, and trending keywords.

Check it out, and even submit some feedback to add to the research!

via A Visual Backchannel for VisWeek 2010.

Science interactive, research, visweek

Do you love MAXON Cinema4D and want to try Stereoscopic rendering?  Then be sure to check out this free stereoscopic camera rig plugin.  It’s got a nice feature list:

• off axis setup
• optional parallel or toed-in setup
• image width & FOV calculator for parallel setup
• automatic near- & farplane calculation
• automatic camera distance calculation
• anaglyph preview in black and white, full color & optimized anaglyph (still stretched, when frame to small – grrrr) Needs Mograph2 Camera Shader. If you don’t have Mograph, maybe this free Plug-In will help: Camera Shader

Check out the demo video, and go check it out for yourself.

SV Stereo Rig v3.1 – free stereoscopic camera rig for Cinema 4D from Stefan Voigt on Vimeo.

via Download free stereoscopic camera rig for Cinema 4D.

Graphics cinema4d, maxon, plugin, software, stereoscopic

Brian Staats took the data from registrations for VisWeek 2009 and 2010 and created the “www.InsideVisweek.com” website where you can interactively view registration figures for both events and compare them.

Inside VisWeek is hosted on Google App Engine and programmed in Python. The front end utilizes Jquery, jLinq, and Protovis. The data is provided by IEEE and is de-identified before further processing such as cleaning up untyped data (e.g. organization names). A modern browser is required (i.e. not MSIE).

This is also the focus of a Poster at VisWeek2010, so be sure to stop by and say Hi!

Inside VisWeek 2010.

Science interactive, visweek, Website

India’s Spice Mobile is looking to ‘break the mold’ with the world’s first 3D telephone boasting a no-glasses autostereoscopic screen on it’s tiny 2.4-inch display.  When asked why:

“With growing popularity of 3D content and devices, this is one segment we wanted to tap. We have created this new device for people looking for smart mobile phones,” Spice Mobility Vice President (Marketing) Naveen Paul said.

So it’s purely a selling point, a marketing trick.  It’s priced interestingly enough, at only 4299 Rs (Indian rupees), which translates to a mere $97 USD.

via Spice Mobile launches country’s first 3D phone at Rs 4,299 – Hindustan Times.

Hardware 3d, mobile, stereoscopic

The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, home of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, just upgraded their main data-crunching supercomputing with 480 GPU’s, making it approximately 1-million times faster.

Researchers at the lab, officially known as Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, took the same approach, only they applied it to nuclear physics.

They turbocharged 266 central processing units, the part of a computer that functions like a brain, with 480 graphics processing units. As a result, the system absorbs information 1 million times faster than a standard computer.

The system helps researchers better predict and analyze experiments performed at the lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. The beam, like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, smashes atoms together to decipher quarks, dark matter and other particles that make up the basic building blocks of matter.

The work was funded by $5 Million from the ARRA (that always annoys me a bit), and was done with NVidia graphics cards.

However, I must report that I don’t entirely trust the numbers in the report.  They talk about 480 graphics units, but it’s a GTX480 in the system (From the photo above), so someone may have been confused.  Also, 1-million times faster I think is supposed to be compared to a single desktop, a relatively useless comparison.  More useful would be to see how it performed comparing the system before and after the GPUs were installed.

via Video game parts help build supercomputer at Jefferson Lab – WTKR.

Hardware, Science gpgpu, hpc, nvidia, research

Another neat gadget from VisWeek, this time from Rutgers University.  The Vox system compiles data from twitter and other sources, and plots it all in a timeline with some nice searching and filtering tools, creating a neat way to dig through public sentiment around an event.

Vox Event Analytics is a visual analytics system designed to help make sense of the social information stream related to news and other events. Vox is in a pre-alpha stage and we’d really like to get your feedback on the site and application: please contact Nick Diakopoulos at [email protected] with bug reports or other suggestions.

via Vox.

Science interactive, socialmedia, vox

An interesting find from VisWeek is the “Delft Visualization Group Start Kit”, a collection of required-reading for all PhD or Master’s candidates in the program.  It’s only 5 papers, but it’s a good core foundation for anything interested in Scientific Visualization research.

• T. Munzner, Visualization, Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, P. Shirley and S. Marschner, AK Peters, 2009, pp. 675-707. PDF fulltext.
• B. Laramee, How to Read a Visualization Research Paper: Extracting the Essentials, in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (IEEE CG&A), forthcoming. PDF fulltext.
• T. Munzner, A Nested Process Model for Visualization Design and Validation, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 15, 2009. PDF fulltext.
• B. Laramee, How To Write A Visualization Research Paper: A Starting Point, Computer Graphics Forum (CGF). PDF fulltext.
• T. Munzner, Process and Pitfalls in Writing Information Visualization Research Papers, Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 2008. PDF fulltext.

A good start, and if you want more, be sure to check out this articles written here on VizWorld by Alark Joshi:

• Seminal Information Visualization Papers
• Visualization in Network Security

DelftVisStarterKit – TU Delft Computer Graphics Website.

Science list, papers

Today we bring several interesting business infographics. First, we take a look at who are the Entrepreneurs with a help of Contact Me, and then Latitude Research shows us the New Sharing Economy Study, followed by the LGBT Corporate Equality Index 2011, made by Tiffany Farrant. The International Language of Business, from Work Shifting, brings an overview on how executives from several countries use different channels to communicate among themselves. Finally, all about Engagement and Interruption marketing, by Robert van Geenhuizen.

Read more…

Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations