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Kitware has just announced the immediate availability of ParaView 3.10, boasting a huge new collection of features.  For starters:

For the 3.10 release,  we have added 60 new readers, which include: ANSYS, CGNS, Chombo, Dyna3D, Enzo, Mili, Miranda, Nastran, Pixie, Samrai, Silo, and Tecplot Binary. A full listing of supported readers can be found in the ParaView Users Guide. We also added the ability for developers to create ParaView reader plugins from previously developed VisIt reader plugins. You can find a full guide on how to do this on the VisIt Database Bridge.

After that, they have a new Python-based calculator:

We have included a Python-based calculator which makes it possible to write operations using Python. The Python calculator uses NumPy, which lets you use advanced functions such as gradients, curls, and divergence easily in expressions. Also the NumPy module is packaged in the ParaView binary and is importable from the ParaView Python shell.

But that’s not all.  They’ve got a new parallel-standalone version, great for folks on beefy workstations, along with new menus, smarter filters, and a new pipeline for composite and multi-block datasets.

A huge collection of new features, all available for free right now!

via Kitware – News: ParaView 3.10.0 Now Available.

Science kitware, paraview, software

John Carmack, long time creator of such gamign classics as Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, dropped a bombshell on the graphics community in an interview with bit-tech where the announced his newly found favor for Direct3D over OpenGL.

Speaking to bit-tech for a forthcoming Custom PC feature about the future of OpenGL in PC gaming, Carmack said ‘I actually think that Direct3D is a rather better API today.’ He also added that ‘Microsoft had the courage to continue making significant incompatible changes to improve the API, while OpenGL has been held back by compatibility concerns. Direct3D handles multi-threading better, and newer versions manage state better.’

Carmack has long been a supporter of OpenGL, using it in most of his games and being somewhat of a champion for cross-platform gaming in the process (Fat chance getting DirectX games on Linux, for example).

via Carmack: Direct3D is now better than OpenGL | bit-gamer.net.

Graphics, Science carmack, directx, opengl

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The NOAA Center for Tsunami Research has released their initial visualizations of this morning’s Honshu Tsunami event.

The graphics display forecast results, showing qualitative and quantitative information about the tsunami, including tsunami wave interaction with ocean floor bathymetric features, and neighboring coastlines. Tsunami model amplitude information is shown color-coded according the scale bar.

While the earthquake and tsunami were devastating, the plots show an interesting beauty to the event.

via NOAA Center for Tsunami Research – Tsunami Event – March 3, 2011 Honshu.

Science noaa, tsunami, weather

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CoolInfographics points us to this great venn-diagram style visualization of the many aspects of data visualization, bringing to mind the earlier discussion of the difference between infographics and datavis.

As data visualization is still new, we find ourselves explaining what it is rather often. We sat down and thought of a diagram we could show to people confused by what we do.

In essence, data visualization is a new pluri-disciplinary domain, where different expertises blend and overlap — it mixes different perspectives, and that is what we wanted to represent.

Infographics seem to be firmly in the upper center region, while I (a visualization scientist) operate just to the lower-left of center.  What about you?

What is Data Visualization? – FFunction – Data Visualization. via CoolInfographics

Science venn diagram

Earlier this week AMD threw down the performance gauntlet with their dual-chip Radeon HD6990.  Today, NVidia answers their challenge with some help from EVGA thanks to the new GeForce GTX460 “2Win”, which contains dual GF104 Fermi chips.

EVGA has just set loose the details of a new GTX 460 2Win graphics card, which ticks along at 700MHz, has 672 cumulative CUDA cores served by 2GB of GDDR5, and reportedly collects more 3D Marks than NVIDIA’s finest card out at the moment, the GTX 580. The company also gleefully reports that pricing of the 2Win model will be lower than the 580′s. It’s interesting that NVIDIA is opting for a pair of the older-gen GF104 Fermi chips here, but then again, those have been big winners with critics and price-sensitive gamers alike, with many touting the use of two GTX 460s in SLI as a more sensible solution than the elite single-card options

No word on performance yet, but it definitely sounds attractive.

via EVGA GeForce GTX 460 2Win has ‘double the win,’ becomes NVIDIA’s first dual-Fermi graphics card — Engadget.

Hardware evga, fermi, nvidia

For our last selection of the week, travel is the chosen topic. First, we get to meet the 10 Tallest Hotels in the World, with a help from Cheap Hotels. Then, some Exotic Vacation Destinations, suggested by HCC Medical Insurance, followed by Mint‘s useful Tipping Etiquette Around the World. And to close, a look at startup Airbnb, and the 10 reasons single ladies should vacation in Vail, Colorado.

Read more…

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

How to Spot a Liar

iPad 2 vs. Competitors: Battle of the Tablet Specs

Graphics, Science digest, infographics, list

Intel has posted an article on using the Cloud to perform ray tracing in games. Normally, I am not a fan of the term Cloud, because of its overuse and hype. However, in this case, I will make an exception because it uses Intel’s Knights Ferry. What is Knight’s Ferry? Remember Larrabee? Larrabee was the codename for a GPGPU chip that Intel was developing, that was canceled. The follow-on project is called Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) project, with the first product being codenamed Knight’s Corner. Knight’s Ferry falls up under the MIC project. The article describes Knight’s Ferry as:

Intel code name Knights Ferry is the first-generation development platform for the Intel MIC Architecture. It includes a PCIe card that has a 32-core chip on it that is clocked at 1.2 GHz. The development platform is programmable with the regular tools and programming languages that developers regularly use. A bit further out there are plans for an Intel MIC Architecture-based product, code named Knights Corner, that will use 22nm manufacturing technology and will therefore be able to even have more than 50 cores on the chip.

The researchers used four server machines, each with a Knights Ferry PCIe card (32 cores, 4 threads per core). Each server also had a i7-980X processor, which has 6 cores running at 3.33 GHz. The thin client was a a small laptop, running on a Core2 Duo processor P9600 and with a 1280×800 screen.

Everything was connected over a Gigabit Ethernet LAN. Now, not everybody has Gigabit Ethernet, but this is a proof of concept, not a finished product. I suspect that Gigabit Ethernet is not necessary anyway. Sure, it gives you a lot of bandwidth, but from my own testing of remote visualization services cloud-based applications, it is the latency that is most important. If you are getting a 100 ms ping, then that means you can only get 10 frames per second, at best. You really need a connection with less than 33 ms ping time to get 30 frames per second, and it would be best if it was even lower.

Now if all of this sounds familiar, it is because we covered it last year in Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced, On a Laptop. At the time, we did not know that they were using Knight’s Ferry. From the conclusion to the article:

Over the last sections it has been shown that ray tracing can offer a variety of new and interesting effects to games. Through this research using a cloud-based gaming setup with machines that utilize the Intel code name Knights Ferry development platform, ray-traced games with a high frame rate can already be achieved today.

Further progress could be made by optimizing the video codec used in order to be able to use it for even smaller devices such as netbooks and tablets. Instead of assuming a Gigabit Ethernet setup, optimizations for wireless networks could be investigated to bring the technology to handheld devices like smartphones. In order to cut down on the number of servers needed, it should be possible to develop support for using multiple Knights Ferry PCIe cards within a single machine. To increase image quality, several well-known post-processing techniques like HDR bloom and depth of field could be added. A smart solution on how to do anti-aliasing for ray tracing with high performance on the Knights Ferry platform could also be investigated.

via : Experimental Cloud-based Ray Tracing Using Intel® MIC Architecture for Highly Parallel Visual Processing

Hardware cloud, intel, knights ferry, larrabee, raytrace, raytracer, raytracing

FXGuide has a great behind-the-scenes look at the visual effects of recent Nicholas Cage action flick ‘Drive Angry’.

Many of the film’s 520 effects shots were made up of foreground and background stereo composites, with early one-off shots designed to hint at the film’s supernatural elements. “The visual effects in the movie,” says Neufeld, “for 15 to 30 seconds at a time and at various places, are designed to reveal that Milton is no ordinary escaped convict and The Accountant is somewhat other-worldly. What ensues are lots of little looks of the powers that might be unleashed from hell, but only hints. Each of those little moments is an effect which leads up to the end of the film.”

via Revv-ealing effects: Drive Angry 3D | fxguide.

Graphics movie, vfx

via How to Spot a Liar.

infographics