VizWorld.com

Another entry in the growing HPC Remote Visualization space comes from “NICE” software, who has just announced a new version of their EnginFrame2013 product that offers tools for creating and managing remote visualization resources.

Designed for technical computing users in a broad range of markets (Oil&Gas, Automotive, Aerospace, Medical, Finance, Research, and more), EnginFrame simplifies engineers’ and scientists’ workflows through its intuitive, self-documenting interfaces, increasing productivity and streamlining data and resource management.

Leveraging all the major HPC job schedulers and remote visualization technologies, EnginFrame translates user clicks into the appropriate actions to submit HPC jobs, create remote visualization sessions, monitor workloads on distributed resources, manage data and many more.

via NICE EnginFrame 2013 Redefines Management of 3D and 2D Remote Visualization Sessions in the Technical Cloud – News & Events – NICE.

Science hpc, nice, remotedisplay, visualization

If you’ve ever wondered how these giant world-wide high-resolution maps come together, Wired has a great new article with the creators of “MapBox”.  MapBox is taking continuous streams of satellite data from the likes of NASA to construct giant near-realtime images of the entire globe at staggering resolutions.

“For the new release we’re processing two years of imagery, captured from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2012,” says Loyd, “this amounts to over 339,000 16-megapixel+ satellite images, totaling more than 5,687,476,224,000 pixels. We boil these down to a mere 5 billion or so.”

The first problem is even getting the data. It’s all available in the public domain, but just transferring it over to MapBox’s servers was a major task because of the volume. To do this render, they needed to download two thirds of a terabyte of compressed data. “We’ve got 30 to 40 servers pulling down data from NASA,” says Herwig. “We called them up and said, ‘hey we’re going to hit you hard, what’s the best way we can do it for you?’”

via A Cloudless Atlas — How MapBox Aims to Make the World’s ‘Most Beautiful Map’ | Wired Design | Wired.com.

Graphics, Science mapbox, maps, nasa

Between smart phones, social media, and the everpresent “cloud”, Humans are creating data at scales previously thought impossible.  While great strides have been made in basic processing of this data for advertising and a few other areas, deep value remains buried in these mountains of information.  GigaOm takes a look at 6 new startups looking to find newfound gold in these mountains of data.

They are to big data what server and network configurations are to mobile-app development on platforms like Parse. If you’re going to find out new things from massive and highly complex data sets, or going to give new types of people the ability to analyze even simple data, the presentation of that data and the ability to create consumable presentations are critical.

via Visualization is the future: 6 startups re-imagining how we consume data — Tech News and Analysis.

Science bigdata, startups

Did you know you can hone your roulette strategy by understanding physics?

Most people have always considered roulette to be a game of chance, but some experts beg to differ. Some say that having paid extra attention in your high school physics class may come in handy when playing your next hand of online roulette.

Applying Basic Physics to Your Roulette Strategy
If you are looking for a way to beat the house when playing roulette, look no further, except maybe to brush up on your physics knowledge, particularly the concept of chaos theory. However, most people playing online roulette are not physicists, so let’s break it down to simpler terms.

Using Physics as Roulette Strategy
The main key to the game is to remain focused. Always focus on the location of the ball when the wheel starts spinning as well as the speed of the wheel. When playing roulette, concentrate on a fixed point on the wheel and count to see how long it takes for the ball to pass that point one time. This will essentially determine the velocity of the ball around the wheel. This will only work well if the wheel spins at relatively the same speed every time.

Keep in mind that playing on any European style wheel will give the player a slight advantage than on an American wheel, since the American wheel has the addition of the number 0 on the board. This additional number gives the house the advantage.

Using this strategy does not necessarily mean that you have to guess one specific number over another, simply based on where you think the ball will land. If you have counted and notice a pattern, you can choose from a certain area or even half of the wheel, which will increase your chances of winning by a lot.

It is important to remember that although using physics as a strategy of increasing your odds, it is never a guarantee. Roulette, as any casino game, is about chance. Sometimes you win big though, and using any strategy can help your game.  Be a smart player, start concentrating on how long it takes the ball to complete a full turn on the wheel, and start winning big cash prizes right away.

Science casino, physics, roulette

The Top 10 Foods for Exceptional Health

Compare 3G vs 4G

Graphics, Science digest, infographics, list

I’m gonna take a little departure from our regularly scheduled graphics content and introduce all of you (at least all of you who don’t already know) to a tool called “ack”. Affectionally calling itself “a tool like grep, optimized for programmers”, that’s exactly what it is.

It’s capable of searching text files with incredible speed, searching my entire OpenSceneGraph tree for occurances of “glBegin” in about 4 seconds (from the screenshot above).  It’s also smart enough to know to avoid VCS directories, eliminating the constant frustration of finding stuff buried in your .svn and .git folders.  Written entirely in perl, it’s available as a module for linux & Mac (port), or as a single script you can download and use.

Check it out at the link below.

Beyond grep: ack 2.04, a source code search tool for programmers.

Science programming, source code

The Road to Wealth

Graphics, Science digest, infographics, list

Twitter has made another move towards monetizing their service through acquisition of a small startup called “Lucky Sort”, creators of a technology called TopicWatch.

In effect, Lucky Sort was a big data play – it used NLP (natural language processing) techniques to discover information from huge, unstructured data sets. What made it unique was its ability to derive structure without having to first define a database of nouns, verbs, etc. as traditionally would be the case with NLP. Instead, Lucky Sort was moved towards data mining through statistics rather than input ontologies.

Three of the key engineers behind TopicWatch are now joining twitter’s “Revenue Engineering Department”, which sounds like a very cryptic name that’s sure to conjure images of suits, ties, and greasy salesmen.  LuckySort has already proven to be fascinating in their integrations with StockTwits and a few other tools that could distill the massive twitter firehose into interesting interactive visualizations and data-mining tools.  So watch yourself on twitter, you never know what might come up next.

via Twitter Acquires Big Data Visualization Startup Lucky Sort, Service To Shutter In Months Ahead | TechCrunch.

Science bigdata, twitter

NVidia has released the latest version of their popular NSight OpenGL & GLSL Debugging suite, boasting new support for OpenGL4.2, CUDA5, and new local-debugger features.

The final release of Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition 3.0 is available for download under Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition Registered Developer Program. This new release officially supports OpenGL frame debugging and profiling, GLSL GPU shader debugging, local single GPU shader debugging, the new Kepler™ GK110 architecture found in Tesla® K20 & GeForce GTX TITAN, and CUDA® 5.0.

Download it at the link below.

via Nsight Visual Studio Edition 3.0 New Features | NVIDIA Developer Zone.

Science cuda, nsight, nvidia, opengl

The Harvard Business Review has a nice interview with Linda Boff of GE on their use of visualizations.

As a large multinational company, we do have many audiences. And they range from employees and retirees to retail investors and thought leaders. Initially we thought about this — and I think to a large degree continue to — as a way to do external storytelling, but we have found that it works on so many different levels.

As a result, we have used data visualization in places as diverse as our annual reports or our annual report app, which is obviously geared toward investors. We’ve used it with thought leaders. When we released a white paper last fall on the industrial Internet, data visualization was a great way to tell that story.

via How GE Uses Data Visualization to Tell Complex Stories – Gretchen Gavett – Our Editors – Harvard Business Review.

Science ge, interview