VizWorld.com

Another win for NVidia in the VFX and CUDA space comes from Double Negative, who found their proprietary fluid simulation system “Squirt” getting a nice 20x performance boost.

“Moving our fluid solver onto the GPU allows our artists to get the results of their simulations back much faster, without any impact to their workflow,” explained Dan Bailey, lead GPU developer, Double Negative. “By default, fluid simulations are now sent to a specialized GPU farm, affording the artists more time to iterate and ramp up the complexity of a shot to achieve a more believable result for the big screen.”

It took 6 months of hard work to complete the transition, and the 20x number they’re seeing isn’t even using a Quadro4000 (Fermi-based).  Just wait until they upgrade to see the numbers then.

via DNeg Accelerating Visual Effects with NVIDIA Quadro and CUDA « NVIDIA.

Graphics, Hardware cuda, doublenegative, nvidia, vfx

The brains behind one of my favorite visualization tools ParaView, the guys at Sandia National Labs, have turned their sites on new prey: Textual Analysis.   Their new tool “ParaText” can process massive collections of text in parallel across massive supercomputers, churning through massive 500-million work collections in under a day.  (War and Peace is only 560,000 words).

ParaText distributes a different subset of documents to each processor, which in turn analyses that subset. And because of their efforts to minimize communication and make ParaText scalable, the result is a tool that could be run in a variety of environments, including on a grid or cloud. It can be embedded in any application using a native C++ API, Python, or Java. A standalone ParaText MPI executable can be run via command line. Or ParaText can be deployed as a web service using a RESTful API.

ParaText is based on the existing Titan Informatics toolkit, created by Sandia and Kitware

via Textual analysis in parallel | iSGTW.

Science algorithm, paratext, sandia, software

Enrico Bertini has another great article on an increasingly big (pun totally intended) problem about “data bloat”.  As data sizes continue to grow, we find that Pixel counts don’t.  How do you deal with “big data”?  How do you know when your data is “too big”?

When is data too much?

It’s not easy to define when data is too much. Do it even make sense to say that data is too much? In statistical data analysis there are somewhat clear ways to state when data is too few, but I am not sure whether there are ways to say when it is too much. Intuitively the more you get, the better, right? But in visualization this is a whole different story. The more we have the harder the task.

via How do you visualize too much data? — Fell in Love with Data.

Science extreme

This is a fun way to generate a quick infographic that actually means something. BillShrink has an interactive application that allows you enter your birth year, then generates how much something cost when you were born versus today. You can see what it generated for me above. The numbers look about right, except for the yearly income, which looks a bit low.

Do you know how much an average house sold for in the year you were born? What about the price of a pound of steak? Use this interactive graphic to discover how much inflation has effected prices since your birth year.

via : Birth Year Inflation @ BillShrink

Graphics interactive infographic

NGC 3621 is a spiral galaxy about 22 million light-years away in the constellation of Hydra (The Sea Snake). It is comparatively bright and can be seen well in moderate-sized telescopes. This picture was taken using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The data were selected from the ESO archive by Joe DePasquale as part of the Hidden Treasures competition. Joe’s picture of NGC 3621 was ranked fourth in the competition.

This galaxy has a flat pancake shape, indicating that it hasn’t yet come face to face with another galaxy as such a galactic collision would have disturbed the thin disc of stars, creating a small bulge in its centre. Most astronomers think that galaxies grow by merging with other galaxies, in a process called hierarchical galaxy formation. Over time, this should create large bulges in the centres of spirals. Recent research, however, has suggested that bulgeless, or pure-disc, spiral galaxies like NGC 3621 are actually fairly common.

This galaxy is of further interest to astronomers because its relative proximity allows them to study a wide range of astronomical objects within it, including stellar nurseries, dust clouds, and pulsating stars called Cepheid variables, which astronomers use as distance markers in the Universe. In the late 1990s, NGC 3621 was one of 18 galaxies selected for a Key Project of the Hubble Space Telescope: to observe Cepheid variables and measure the rate of expansion of the Universe to a higher accuracy than had been possible before. In the successful project, 69 Cepheid variables were observed in this galaxy alone.

Multiple monochrome images taken through four different colour filters were combined to make this picture. Images taken through a blue filter have been coloured blue in the final picture, images through a yellow-green filter are shown as green and images through a red filter as dark orange. In addition images taken through a filter that isolates the glow of hydrogen gas have been coloured red. The total exposure times per filter were 30, 40, 40 and 40 minutes respectively.

This zoom sequence starts with a view of the southern parts of the Milky Way. As we zoom in we can see the spiral galaxy NGC 3621, lying about 22 million light-years from us. The final detailed view shows a new image from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The data used to make this image were selected from the ESO archive by Joe DePasquale as part of the Hidden Treasures competition.

Credit:

ESO/S. Brunier and Joe DePasquale. Music:John Dyson (from the album “Moonwind”)

via : A Picture-perfect Pure-disc Galaxy

Science astronomy, eso

A lot of experts say that 2010 was the year of the Mobile Web, and today we bring you some recent infographics about it, starting with some shocking numbers behind cell phone usage, made by Online IT Degree. We then take a look at the secret of Android ‘s amazing growth, found on Gizmodo, and at Windows Space‘s Windows phone 7 overview. The folks at Apps Fire compared iOS Apps and Web Apps, and we close this Daily Viz from Visual Loop with some SEO basic knowledge for SMB, from DIY SEO.

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

Come on, be honest: do you really read the Privacy Policies on every website you provide your information? Well, don’t be ashamed, because there’s a good reason for that, according to Select Out. From Focus comes yet another State of the Internet infographic, followed by some interesting data on how Americans watch TV, provided by Lab 42. Blogging Bookshelf tells us why companies should to try to be “Bacterial” instead of “Viral”, and from Braintrack a nice piece on the oldest Computers still in use.

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