Over at the HPC-CH blog, they’ve got an interview with Argonne’s Venkartram Vishwanath on how he’s dealing with some extremely large simulation datasets. They’ve found that the visualization isn’t just good for finding insight in their data, but also a great workaround for IO bottlenecks that arise from the huge filesizes.
Venkartram agrees that one challenge of next generation simulations is that I/O will not keep up with the growth rate of computing capability. In his group at Argonne they are now working on efficient infrastructure and software to reduce the amount of data being written to storage to perform analysis, as well as in-situ visualization while the simulation is progress. This will facilitate the transformation of the data into insight.
What kind of Planetarium can you build for $14M US Dollars? Apparently, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Boasting 42 NVidia Quadro GPU’s and 20 high-resolution projectors, they project a massive 64-megapixel 190-degree display onto the 71-foot dome.
“Our goal was to create an experience that was the closest you could get to outer space travel,” said Paul H. Knappenberger Jr., the Adler’s president. “We want visitors to feel like they are really traveling through the universe to see galaxies collide and witness stars and planets being born.”
So what do you sho won this? Right now they’re showing some high-resolution space simulation results from NASA Ames Research Center that generated 400 Terabytes of data.
Do you have $36,000 laying around? Do you not mind paying $1000 per inch for screen real-estate? Do you need a computer monitor that offers such extreme resolution that you can see Duke’s individual hair follicles? Then Eiko has just the display for you coming out this September, a massive 4Kx2K monitor. Equivalent to 4 standard 1080p monitors stacked 2 by 2, this reminds me much of the old IBM T221 monitor. Hopefully this one will fare better.
A nice piece of work comes from Halta Definizione who has compiled the world’s highest resolution photograph. Notice it’s not the world’s largest photograph, as it only clocks in at 16 gigapixels, but that 16 billion pixels is focused entirely on Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”.
So what is this picture portraying? Well, it wouldn’t be right if it wasn’t Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper“. The depth of the image is just mind boggling. You can zoom down to the smallest grain of paint and still not lose the clarity or the crispness of the image itself. It’s really amazing to zoom and pan around in search of those infamous details that we all know of since the movie “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown.
Take one beefy PC, one GTX590, three 3D-capable high-resolution projectors, and some patience, and what do you get? An impressive triple-display projected screen running at 3840×720. Not extreme resolution, but massive size.
The final result looks like it would be a blast to play, but my personal preference would be to see some blending in the edges instead of simple transition. See his creation in the video below.
360 Cities is back with another record, this time for the World’s Largest indoor photo: An impressive 40 gigapixel image of the Strahov Library.
This image was created from 3,000 individual photos stitched together into a single image that is 280,000 x 140,000 pixels. That’s around 40 gigapixels, or 4000 megapixels. If you printed this photo it would be 23 meters (or 78 feet) long!
It really is beautiful, although I wish a book had been left open in the room so that you could read it at full-zoom.
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.
Another entry into the Extreme Panoram space comes from the ‘Sevilla 111″ project that has an impressive 111-Gigapixel image up in their interactive viewer. Combining an impressive 9,750 images, it contains some amazing details. You can zoom in to see individual people on the street, planes in the sky, and even individual leaves on trees.
This blows the earlier 70-Gigapixel Budapest out of the water, and makes the 45-Gigapixel Dubai a laughable endeavor. What city do you think is worthy of being the first Terapixel Panoram? I would have to cast my vote for the lights of New York City or Tokyo.
Researchers at the University of Utah are demonstrating a new software tool they call ‘VISUS’ (Visualization Streams for Ultimate Scalability) that allows interactive editing on massive multi-gigapixel images.
In one example, they used the software to perform “seamless cloning,” which means taking one image and merging it with another image. They combined a 3.7-gigapixel image of the entire Earth with a 116-gigapixel satellite photo of the city of Atlanta, zooming in on the Gulf of Mexico and putting Atlanta underwater there.
“An artist can interactively place a copy of Atlanta under shallow water and recreate the lost city of Atlantis,” says the new study, which is titled, “Interactive Editing of Massive Imagery Made Simple: Turning Atlanta into Atlantis.”
The work was funded by the US Department of Energy & the NSF, the researchers are already planning a company to commercialize the work. The technology shows promise in fields like surveillance and national security, where massive satellite images can be a bit daunting to deal with, especially when an analyst might have to deal with several hundred of them over the period of a few months to monitor equipment movements.
Putting high-resolution images of famous paintings online is nothing new, although it’s a hotly debated topic amongst museum curators as to whether or not it hurts admissions. But even the highest end cameras can’t compare with what’s coming out of Italy’s ‘Haltadefinizione’ or HAL9000 project which puts up massive images equaling 1,500ppi.
Their more recent image of Botticelli’s La Primivera consists of 28 billion pixels, about 3,000 times the resolution of a consumer digital camera. The pixel density (pixels per inch, or ppi) has also increased, from 580 to 1,500ppi (magazine and book printing are typically 300ppi).
In contrast to the “gallery view” afforded by the online Monet exhibit (in which you can see individual brushstrokes wonderfully), these images are more like a “conservator’s view”, allowing you to zoom in to a level as if observed under a magnifying lens.
The interactive visualization tools are a bit sluggish to get started, afterall that’s some massive data to page in. After that tho, the detail you can see is simply amazing.
Over at the HPC-CH blog, they’ve got an interview with Argonne’s Venkartram Vishwanath on how he’s dealing with some extremely large simulation datasets. They’ve found that the visualization isn’t just good for finding insight in their data, but also a great workaround for IO bottlenecks that arise from the huge filesizes.
What kind of Planetarium can you build for $14M US Dollars? Apparently, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Boasting 42 NVidia Quadro GPU’s and 20 high-resolution projectors, they project a massive 64-megapixel 190-degree display onto the 71-foot dome.
Do you have $36,000 laying around? Do you not mind paying $1000 per inch for screen real-estate? Do you need a computer monitor that offers such extreme resolution that you can see Duke’s individual hair follicles? Then Eiko has just the display for you coming out this September, a massive 4Kx2K monitor. Equivalent to 4 standard 1080p monitors stacked 2 by 2, this reminds me much of the old 
A nice piece of work comes from Halta Definizione who has compiled the world’s highest resolution photograph. Notice it’s not the world’s largest photograph, as it only clocks in at 16 gigapixels, but that 16 billion pixels is focused entirely on Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”.
Take one beefy PC, one GTX590, three 3D-capable high-resolution projectors, and some patience, and what do you get? An impressive triple-display projected screen running at 3840×720. Not extreme resolution, but massive size.
360 Cities is back with another record, this time for the World’s Largest indoor photo: An impressive 40 gigapixel image of the Strahov Library.
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”?
Another entry into the Extreme Panoram space comes from the ‘Sevilla 111″ project that has an impressive 111-Gigapixel image up in their interactive viewer. Combining an impressive 9,750 images, it contains some amazing details. You can zoom in to see individual people on the street, planes in the sky, and even individual leaves on trees.
VizWorld.com 
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