One of the winners at this summer’s SciDAC Visualization Night was an impressive visualization of a massive 8.0 earthquake on the San Andreas fault.
The simulation follows the rapid expansion of an earthquake wave front on the San Andreas fault as it approaches the city of San Diego. The strongest motions correspond to a white color and the weakest, a red color, with the ground motion magnitude represented as a height field.
The simulation took almost a quarter-million cores of Jaguar and Kraken (both NSF machines at ORNL), and shows the leading edge of the shock front.
Although this is the season of joy and happiness, there’s a side of Christmas that often goes forgotten – and it’s not the best side. Todays Daily Viz from Visual Loop brings some examples that illustrate the environmental impacts behind all the stuff used in Christmas celebrations. Infographics provided by Online Education, Banned Hollywood, Cool Infographics, Intuit and All In One.
CodingHorror isn’t typically a website to visit for visualization advice, but a new post over there details the many types of anti-aliasing algorithms, complete with lots of detail and examples and the original paper for the FXAA algorithm.
Pretty much all “modern” anti-aliasing is some variant of the MSAA hack, and even that costs a quarter of your framerate. That’s prohibitively expensive, unless you have so much performance you don’t even care, which will rarely be true for any recent game. While the crawling lines of aliasing do bother me, I don’t feel anti-aliasing alone is worth giving up a quarter of my framerate and/or turning down other details to pay for it.
But that was before I learned that there are some emerging alternatives to MSAA. And then, much to my surprise, these alternatives started showing up as actual graphics options in this season’s PC games — Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Batman: Arkham City, and so on. What is this FXAA thing, and how does it work?
For being such an iconic and easy to understand phenomena, Rainbows have long been difficult to simulate mathematically. The recently meme’d double-rainbow has long been missing from most simulations, but thanks to some recent discoveries by researchers at UC San Diego, they may now be simulation reality.
Until now, most simulations of rainbows had assumed that water drops are spherical, which isn’t true for large rain drops, Laven says. In this paper, researchers have adopted a completely different approach and developed a more realistic model to recreate rainbows, he says.
“The simulations shown in this paper offer the prospect of a better understanding of real rainbows,” Laven says. “I hope that the next step will be to use these new techniques for a systematic investigation of rainbows caused by realistically shaped rain drops.”
FireUser.com has a user-contribution from Antonio Fontenele benchmarking a Quadro 1800FX against the AMD FirePro v5800 in a variety of tests. In an interesting twist he compares the various vendor “optimized” drivers against their counterparts provided by Autodesk (Both of these cards are Autodesk approved), and finds a startling different in performance.
In Cadalyst Systems Benchmark 2011 test, Quadro a little faster than FirePro while using AutoCAD default drivers due c2011_8.dwg file score, but it was slower than FirePro in the other files (where FirePro was 102.32% faster). However, using AutoCAD optimized drivers, Quadro earned 613 points while FirePro earned a higher score equal to 2060 points. This is means about 336.05% faster in AutoCAD 2011.
Our Christmas infographic roundup week continues today with Lemon.ly‘s recent piece about Christmas around the World, followed by a couple of humorous ones: Santa’s Insurance Costs and the Top 20 Fun Christmas facts around the World, by Confused and Venere Travel. To close our Daily Viz from Visual Loop, Mademan‘s everything there is to know about Eggnog, and the History of Christmas Cookies, brought by All Culinary Schools.
At SIGGRAPH Asia, researchers from Carnegie Mellon’s CS department are demonstrating an interesting new algorithm capable of matching not only similar images, but matching paintings and sketches against databases of images looking for matches.
The goal of this work is to find visually similar images even if they appear quite different at the raw pixel level. This task is particularly important for matching images across visual domains, such as photos taken over different seasons or lighting conditions, paintings, hand-drawn sketches, etc. We propose a surprisingly simple method that estimates the relative importance of different features in a query image based on the notion of “data-driven uniqueness”. We employ standard tools from discriminative object detection in a novel way, yielding a generic approach that does not depend on a particular image representation or a specific visual domain.
Impressive stuff, check out their demo video below.
He is the ultimate Christmas icon, its worldwide-recognized face, and the embodiment of all the traditions and values. Oh, and did I mentioned children just love him? We’re speaking, of course, about Santa Claus. Today’s Daily Viz from Visual Loop is all about Santa, with some interesting contributions from Degree Search, Seoptimsze, I Go My Way, Travel Insurance and Knowledge Tree.
At the recent “Visualizing Marathon” in Berlin, Moritz Stefaner gave a fun presentation entitled “A Few things that would have been helpful to know beforehand”. Her slide-deck is now online for all to enjoy.
Christmas is getting closer, and all the joy and happiness and good will and vacations…oh, that’s right, not everyone is off work, during the season, like Xobni and Mindflash show in their infographics. From Lab 42, Zendesk and Go Banking Rates comes a look at Christmas shopping spending, the chalenges of shipping, and a breakdown of last year’s 12 Days of Christmas.
One of the winners at this summer’s SciDAC Visualization Night was an impressive visualization of a massive 8.0 earthquake on the San Andreas fault.
Although this is the season of joy and happiness, there’s a side of Christmas that often goes forgotten – and it’s not the best side. Todays Daily Viz from 
CodingHorror isn’t typically a website to visit for visualization advice, but a new post over there details the many types of anti-aliasing algorithms, complete with lots of detail and examples and the original paper for the FXAA algorithm.
For being such an iconic and easy to understand phenomena, Rainbows have long been difficult to simulate mathematically. The recently meme’d double-rainbow has long been missing from most simulations, but thanks to some recent discoveries by researchers at UC San Diego, they may now be simulation reality.
Our Christmas infographic roundup week continues today with 
At SIGGRAPH Asia, researchers from Carnegie Mellon’s CS department are demonstrating an interesting new algorithm capable of matching not only similar images, but matching paintings and sketches against databases of images looking for matches.
He is the ultimate Christmas icon, its worldwide-recognized face, and the embodiment of all the traditions and values. Oh, and did I mentioned children just love him? We’re speaking, of course, about Santa Claus. Today’s Daily Viz from 
Christmas is getting closer, and all the joy and happiness and good will and vacations…oh, that’s right, not everyone is off work, during the season, like 
VizWorld.com 
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