The ACM has just put out the call for entries in this year’s SIGGRAPH2011 Real-Time Live event, where people submit examples of Real-Time rendering work and get a chance to demonstrate it live on-stage.
Building on its debut at the SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival, Real-Time Live! expects to continue its trend of growth and excellence at SIGGRAPH 2011. We are seeking cutting-edge examples of real-time graphics and simulations, including:
Interactive data visualization and information graphics
As long as the submission is interactively controlled, rendered in real time, and repeatable for a live audience, it will be considered. Accepted work will be demonstrated live on a PC or game console.
Even if you don’t plan to submit anything, make sure to check out last year’s demos in this short roundup video.
Here’s an interesting way to visualizing a timeline. Categories of activity are shown around the wheel, while concentric rings visualize time of day.
For a media planning project, we needed to find a simple way to illustrate how people in a particular segment engage with different media. After some experimentation, we came up with this “media wheel” chart that summarizes 216 data points from a media spreadsheet. It shows (zoom in) where — at work, at home, in a restaurant, or in the car — people are when they read newspapers, watch TV, or listen to the radio throughout a typical day. Lighter hues correspond to higher levels of activity.
Personally, I would have flipped the axes (map time around the circle, like a clock, with concentric rings to indicate activities). That would give an interesting biorhythm type of visualization, especially if “sleep” was one of the categories.
This Weekend, ORNL’s Phil Andrews passed away of a sudden and unexpected heart attack. Phil Andrews worked at both UT and ORNL in the leadership of the NICS, including the NSF funded Kraken Supercomputer.
During his career at NICS, the supercomputing centers at San Diego and Pittsburgh and at GA Technologies in San Diego, he authored approximately 40 papers on grid and data intensive computing, documentation and visualization techniques, theoretical plasma physics and nonlinear dynamics. Andrews was involved in high performance computing for more than 30 years in management, software development and as a user. He had a doctorate in theoretical physics from Princeton University, an M.A. from Purdue University and a B.A. in applied mathematics from Cambridge University, England.
Like so many other industries, Hollywood studies have begun to turn to “the cloud” to solve their computational problems. That magical, mystical place where thousands of cores wait to do your bidding, and you don’t have to worry at all about the maintenance or upkeep of them. A short piece at DataCenterKnowledge talks about some of the bigger entries into Cloud rendering this year (Pixar’s Toy STory 3, Dreamworks How To Train your Dragon, etc).
Like DreamWorks turning to HP, Hollywood needs quick access to massive amounts of compute power, yet only for the time it takes to produce the effects or movie, and then they don’t want to be stuck with data center that powered the film. The notion of cloud computing with access to the vast resources of servers, processing power and storage is thus an attractive proposition. “Our strategy going forward is to push as much as we can into the cloud,” says Darcy Antonellis, president of technical operations for Warner Bros. “When you can scale up or scale back so easily, that’s a big economic advantage.”
This is probably the biggest thing most companies see when they think cloud: I can get the effective power of a supercomputer, without having to pay IT to manage it or the Power Bill to keep it running!
Of course, they forget all of the typical networking, security, and software issues that come with it. But those are slowly being whittled away as more and more companies (both users and vendors) embrace the idea.
We have posted in the past that AMD will be coming out with the Radeon HD 6990 in the first quarter of 2011. The Radeon HD 6990, also known by the code name Antilles, will have two Cayman chips on board. Essentially this will be CrossFire on a single graphics card. [H]ard|OCP has the AMD Radeon HD 6990 in-house and played Dragon Age II.
Unfortunately, they were not able to give out any performance numbers, as in frames-per-second. But then again, that is not how [H]ard|OCP like to do things. Instead, they like to compare graphics cards at the highest playable settings. For the Radeon HD 6990 they played the game using Eyefinity set at 5760×1200, 4X Anti-aliasing, 2X anisotropic filtering, High quality in-game settings and screen space ambient occlusion. In comparison, the Radeon HD 6970 was played at 5760×1200, 2X Anti-aliasing, no anisotropic filtering, High quality in-game settings and no screen space ambient occlusion.
We cannot tell you specifications or performance experienced with the Radeon HD 6990 today. What we can tell you is that the video card works and is in complete form. We were able to use it without any issues and play Dragon Age II demo in the DX11 rendering path. There was a distinct gameplay experience difference between the Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6990 which is encouraging.
Rumor has it that this card will be available on March 8th. Rumor also has it that the dual-GPU NVIDIA GeForce 590 is expected real soon now.
Big news from Nvidia today as they announce the latest version of their GPGPU toolkit, CUDA 4.0. This new version has all the usual performance enhancements and bugfixes, but also comes with 3 new features that I can guarantee all you CUDA developers are going to love.
GPUDirect2
GPUDirect2.0 – The previous version of GPUDirect worked with clusters based on Mellanox Infiniband backbones, but this new version works with multiple GPU cards in a single machine. Where previously the CPU was involved in memory transfers between cards, now you can DMA transfer directly between cards using MPI-style Send & Receive commands.
Unified Virtual Addressing – Now, CPUs and GPUs all show up in a single uniform address space. This makes moving memory between them much easier.
Integrated Thrust Support – A great C++ library similar to LABLAS and CULAPACK, it adds in standard template constructs for all the popular data types and algorithms. Thrust has a great following and active community, and boasts run-time selection of CPU vs GPU code, making the resulting code a bit more portable than previous CUDA.
All of this goes to further reinforce NVidia’s commitment to not just building nice graphics cards, but to continue to build and support a developer community around the computational capabilities of their hardware. With renewed support in their Tegra line and the new ARM cores on the horizon, NVidia knows that having a wide community of developers ready to go on the new hardware is critical to mainstream market success. Microsoft is already pumping up support for a future ARM-based Windows, and ARM already has wide support in many embedded applications like settop boxes, smartphones, and tablets. Tools like Unified Virtual Addressing and GPUDirect2 further Nvidia’s attempts to tear down the barriers between the CPU and GPU, making future porting to ARM systems simpler.
Get the full details of the release in the Press Release after the break.
Another edition of the Oscars has passed by, and as it happens with all major events, there was a fairly good number of infographics made on the last weeks about the nominees and the industry’s top event. We’ve picked some, starting with NJ.com‘s look at the history of the Academy Awards throughout the years. The folks at MadeMan created a nice Cheat Sheet about this year’s edition, and then two infographics about the Social Media buzz, by WebTrends and MeltWater. Finally, a curious comparison between the Oscars and the Super Bowl, provided by Visual Economics.
Kelly Gaither is the Director of Data Information & Analysis at the University of Texas, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), and was present in the Dell Booth at SC10 last year touting the impact of visualization in HPC. HPCatDell has an interview with her on YouTube.
“In the visualization, we are exploiting what our brain does every day,” she says, adding that the technology and people who harness it are assisting in curing cancer, understanding how aircraft fly and helping scientists predict hurricanes. One collaboration project, the Longhorn Project, has deployed the largest, remote, interactive visualization cluster in the world.
She was in the Dell Booth as TACC runs some rather large Dell clusters. I’ve known her for several years and heard her speak many times at several events, and she really is a driving force in the HPC visualization space, both for her impact on dealing with large data and parallel systems, and for her development of large “superdisplays” comprised of large tiled displays.
In April, the Citrus Cel Animation festival will be underway in Jacksonville, FL, showing off some great animation work including 2011 Academy Award Nominee “The Lost Thing”.
We are counting down the days for the next installment of the Citrus Cel Animation Film Festival. Things are getting exciting! So many great entries are coming in and special guests are committing. We are looking forward to celebrating animation as a cultural and commercial medium with three days of screenings, contests, parties, special guests, and panels here in Jacksonville, Florida.
Next month, the 6th annual REDCAT International Children’s Film Festival will be underway, hosting a full week of children’s films and television from around the world.
The 6th annual REDCAT International Children’s Film Festival rolls out the red carpet for a mind-expanding collection of short film programs, each crafted with care to appeal to the next generation of movie-lovers. Inspiring, magical works made by acclaimed filmmakers and up-and-coming auteurs alike take you on a celluloid ride around the globe, with enchanting programs for tiny tots, chills and thrills for adventurous older viewers, and films sure to inspire the whole family.
This year’s festival highlights include a special selection of new animation from China curated by acclaimed animator Joe Chang, a program showcasing the emerging talents of indigenous filmmakers from throughout the world, and the always popular Nick Family Fun Day.
The ACM has just put out the call for entries in this year’s SIGGRAPH2011 Real-Time Live event, where people submit examples of Real-Time rendering work and get a chance to demonstrate it live on-stage.
This Weekend, ORNL’s Phil Andrews passed away of a sudden and unexpected heart attack. Phil Andrews worked at both UT and ORNL in the leadership of the NICS, including the NSF funded Kraken Supercomputer.
Like so many other industries, Hollywood studies have begun to turn to “the cloud” to solve their computational problems. That magical, mystical place where thousands of cores wait to do your bidding, and you don’t have to worry at all about the maintenance or upkeep of them. A short piece at DataCenterKnowledge talks about some of the bigger entries into Cloud rendering this year (Pixar’s Toy STory 3, Dreamworks How To Train your Dragon, etc).
Big news from Nvidia today as they announce the latest version of their GPGPU toolkit, CUDA 4.0. This new version has all the usual performance enhancements and bugfixes, but also comes with 3 new features that I can guarantee all you CUDA developers are going to love.
Another edition of the Oscars has passed by, and as it happens with all major events, there was a fairly good number of infographics made on the last weeks about the nominees and the industry’s top event. We’ve picked some, starting with 
Kelly Gaither is the Director of Data Information & Analysis at the University of Texas, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), and was present in the Dell Booth at SC10 last year touting the impact of visualization in HPC. HPCatDell has an interview with her on YouTube.
In April, the Citrus Cel Animation festival will be underway in Jacksonville, FL, showing off some great animation work including 2011 Academy Award Nominee “The Lost Thing”.
Next month, the 6th annual REDCAT International Children’s Film Festival will be underway, hosting a full week of children’s films and television from around the world.
VizWorld.com 
Comments