VizWorld.com

Texas A&M’s Dr. Scotty Schaefer has just received the NSF CAREER Award for his work on “Parameterization and Tessellation for Computer Graphics”.  With the award he’ll be continuing his work through 2017, investigating the relationships between surface shape and quality to parameterization.

“Project outcomes will significantly advance the state of the art not only in computer graphics and geometric modeling, but also in other areas of applied mathematics and computer science where the representation and precise control of smooth freeform shapes play a key role,” Schaefer said.

via Schaefer receives prestigious NSF CAREER Award | News | 2012 | 01 | 20 | College of Engineering.

Science award, nsf, research, texasa&m

The NSF has funded research that has recently culminated in a tool called the “Action Science Explorer”, a fascinating graph-visualization tool for scientific journal databases.

“While traditional search tools for scientific publication databases are still designed as single scrolling windows filled with text we believe that modern information visualization practices, including graphical user interfaces can produce breakthrough ideas,” he said. “The research team brings together skills in search, text analytics and visualization, all focused on searching large databases of scientific publications, so as to accelerate the processes of scientific research.”

A tool like this overlaid over databases like Citeseer would make finding relationships between papers and tracing references such much simpler. Hopefully this technology will be publicly available soon.

via A new visualization method makes research more organized and efficient.

Science interactive, nsf, research

GraphicsSpeak brings us the news that ClearEdge just won a nice NSF grant to be used to enhance their impressive laser scanning technology.  The tech is amazing enough already, but thanks to this new funding they hope to make it even more so, letting you take your LIDAR/Laser scans and convert them automatically to 3D models with a minimum of fuss.

“Our focus has always been to develop software that can complete a 3D model in minutes with only a few mouse clicks,” said Chris Scotton, ClearEdge president and CEO. “This research grant brings the prospect of accurate city-wide 3D models one step closer to reality,”

via GraphicSpeak » ClearEdge3D wins National Science Foundation grant.

Science clearedge, lidar, nsf

TACC is bringing a new Supercomputing online called “Stampede” which aims to push the limits of Linux Cluster designs and further the NSF’s “Extreme Digital” program.  Providing a peak 2 Petaflops of performance, with another 8 petaflops of possible performance thanks to Intel’s Knights Ferry chips, you may be wondering what they plan to use for visualization and analysis.

In addition, Stampede will offer 128 next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) for remote visualization, 16 Dell servers with 1 terabyte of shared memory and 2 GPUs each for large data analysis, and a high-performance Lustre file system for data-intensive computing.

Many people in the field (myself included) believe that the days of dedicated graphics processing systems are numbered, but Stampede seems to indicate they have some life left in them.  However, I have to wonder what percentage of the $50M cost of the system is locked up in these 16 1-terabyte nodes.

via Intel, Dell Powering Stampede Supercomputer in Texas – IT Infrastructure – News & Reviews – eWeek.com.

Hardware, Science hpc, nsf, tacc

Congratulations to Kitware and Berk Geveci for winning a nice $150k DOE grant to build a new user-friendly data analysis application for the complex worldwide climate science databases.

“ClimatePipes will provide access to data that can have a real impact on global climate changes. It will allow the public to better appreciate climate change and enable industries to use climate data in a variety of unforeseen applications,” said Berk Geveci, director of scienfitic computing at Kitware and principle investigator on this SBIR grant. “Our solution aims to be the platform for user-friendly data access, but not to replace high-end analysis tools for scientists. We are looking forward to a tool that is very simple, intuitive, and that can be used by non-researchers and non-programmers.”

I can’t say for certain, but I suspect this will rely heavily on their already built “ParaViewWeb” system for the visualization parts, but I look forward to seeing what they come up with for data provenance.

via Kitware Awarded Department of Energy Research Grant to aid Access to Data Provided by the Ongoing Efforts of the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Science climate, doe, kitware, nsf

The University of Texas San Antonio is getting a new visualization lab on campus funded through a 3-year $482,600 grant from the NSF.  So far they’ve got a 3D monitor (yay, you can tell the announcement came from the PR department, not the actual Viz lab) and a 14.5ft x 6ft visualization wall built from twenty-four 30-inch monitors.  But that’s not all:

The prized possession of the lab, however, is a high-definition haptic device. The device works like a Nintendo Wii for scientists and engineers. It allows researchers to touch and feel digital models they create. It also recreates the feel of a surgical procedure.

 

“If you were a surgeon in training, it’s a device that you could use, with a visual image on the computer screen, be able to feel what it feels like to perform open-heart surgery,” said Frederick.

Won’t put them on even footing with TACC yet, but looks like a battle is brewing for Viz Dominance in Texas.

Advanced Visualization Lab Comes To UTSA – Education News Story – KSAT San Antonio.

Science nsf, utsa

The National Archives has the mission of cataloging millions of records ranging from the important (presidential speeches and decrees) to the mundane (internet tweets) every year, and with the explosive growth of digital media they’ve found themselves at a bit of a quandary.  First off, how do you store the massive amounts of data we generate every day?  Then, how do you find anything inside the giant mountain of data.  The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) partnered with the NSF to create some new digital archival and visualization technology shown in an article on the TACC website.

“Archival analysis is a multi-layered process and it is unique to each collection that is being assessed,” explained Maria Esteva, a digital archivist and data management and collections researcher at TACC. “We are conducting research to map analysis processes used by archivists onto a visualization that combines data driven analysis tools. In this way, the archivist can integrate his or her experience into the workflow.”

The first step in the project was to represent a large and heterogeneous archival collection.

“We are all familiar with desktop icons, representing folders and files,” Esteva said. “But imagine a screen clogged with millions of such icons, with little clue as to what is inside. It takes a visual representation to show millions of files at a time.”

via Texas Advanced Computing Center: A Window on the Archives of the Future.

Science nsf, tacc

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.

via New Software Helps Get The Big Picture Quickly.

Science algorithm, extreme, nsf, software, visus

Another week, another high resolution display wall.  This time at the University of Texas at San Antonio, using a $482,600 grant from the NSF, they will compile twenty-four 30″ monitors into a 15-foot wide by 4.5 foot tall “VisWall”, and drive it with a cluster of Linux workstations.

“(The Vis-Wall) can greatly enhance our ability to understand physical phenomena by building up digital representations — mathematical and computer models — and displaying complex experimental data in a comprehensible fashion,” Feng says. “In my current area of computational cancer research, this new visualization system will be able to display physical and biological systems, from nano- and micro-scale level objects such as nanoparticles and DNA molecules, up to meso- and macro-scale entities like cells, tissues and tumors, all at the same time.”

The VizWall will be used primarily by the new SiViRT center (Simulation, Visualization, and Real-Time Prediction) and miscellaneous teaching.  At least that’s what the announcement says, I don’t think I have to tell you that primarily it will be used as a tour stop.

via UTSA receives grant for high-tech visualization wall – San Antonio Business Journal:.

Hardware, Science displaywall, nsf

It’s no secret that the most powerful supercomputers in the world lie in the hands of the National Science Foundation, the NSF.  John West (of InsideHPC) mentioned a paper by Larry Smarr, a big name in HPC circles, which talks about what the NSF has gotten right and wrong over the duration of the program.  A few things to call out for us Viz folks, first a “Good”:

Drove Scientific Visualization. The need for visualization of the massive datasets generated by the NSF centers drove the development of computer graphics teams at a number of centers. The concept of data-driven scientific visualization quickly swept the academic community, but also had a major impact, largely through SIGGRAPH, on Hollywood and later the gaming community. For instance, Stefen Fangmeier, who was NCSA scientific visualization project manager in 1987, went on to spend over 15 years as a visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, working on such films as Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Dreamcatcher, Perfect Storm, and Master and Commander,

So we have the NSF to thank for alot. But it’s not all good, as evidenced from this clip of “The Ugly”:

Lack of balanced user-to-HPC architecture. From the beginning of the NSF centers program, a basic architectural concept was building a balanced end-to-end system connecting the end user with the HPC resource. Essentially, this was what drove the NSFnet build-out and the strong adoption of NCSA Telnet, allowing end users with Macs or PCs the ability to open up multiple windows on their PCs, including the supercomputer and mass storage systems. Similarly, during the first five years of the PACI, both NPACI and the Alliance spent a lot of their software development and infrastructure developments on connecting the end-user to the HPC resources. But it seems that during the TeraGrid era, the end-users only have access to the TG resources over the shared Internet, with no local facilities for  compute, storage, and visualization that scale up in proportion with the capability of the TG resources. This sets up an exponentially growing data isolation of the end users as the HPC resources get exponentially faster (thus exponentially increasing the size of data sets the end-user needs access to), while the shared Internet throughput grows slowly if at all.

In short:

• Thank the NSF for pushing Scientific Visualization to deal with massive datasets & create realistic visuals
• But they kinda dropped the ball, and aren’t properly handling SciVis requirements now.

For any readers out there working in the NSF, what do you think? Agree, Disagree?

Smarr on “the good, the bad, and the ugly” in the NSF supercomputer program | insideHPC.com.

Science hpc, nsf