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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.

via Riding that wave | iSGTW.

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The annual SciDAC Visualization Night was last month and another 10 great HPC Scientific Visualizations brought home awards.  Wired magazine has the list of winners, complete with their videos.

“The human eye can pick out patterns in simulations that are are otherwise hard to describe, and they can do it better than any computer,” said visualization scientist Joseph Insley of Argonne National Laboratory. “Plus, with the incredible amount of data gathered these days, it’s difficult to analyze it any other way.”

Making a useful scientific simulation isn’t light work. If field researchers want to do it themselves, they must learn to code instructions for computer processing and control advanced 3-D animation software. Because of these hurdles, and the increasing sophistication of modeling methods, most team up with computer and visualization scientists to get the job done.

Disclosure: Me & My Team are included among the winners, the Overhead Threat Protection System video included below.

via 10 Award-Winning Scientific Simulation Videos | Wired Science | Wired.com.

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It took a while, but the DOE finally published the complete list of winners of July’s SciDAC Visualization Night competition.

Recently researchers from the computational science community gathered at the annual Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program (SciDAC) conference in Chattanooga, TN. SciDAC, a program under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, brings together the nation’s top researchers to tackle challenging scientific problems by advancing computational science and developing the tool necessary to enable the use of high-performance computers of the day, as well as those envisioned in the next decade.

They have links to almost all the videos, and a full PDF of the winners can be seen here (view online). Argonne National Lab and the University of Chicago Flash Center won first place with the “Verification Study of Buoyancy-Driven Turbulent Nuclear Combustion for Three Different Physical Simulations”.  It’s a mouthful to say, but just watch the video in awe here.

However, if you look at the press release closely, you might notice something missing.  There were 10 winners, and they name 9 of them in the Press Release (8 of which they even include videos for).  Guess which one they left out?  Mine.

The DOD vs DOE rivalry rages on.

via SCiDAC Visualizations Bring Science to the Senses | News | Communications of the ACM.

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The Department of Energy is holding their annual SciDAC conference in Chattanooga, TN this July.  Part of the conference is a “Visualization Night,” an evening at the Tennessee Aquarium where scientific visualizations from across the HPC community are shown and voted on.  The best videos are given “OASCR” awards.  (See our prior article about last year’s winners.)  Though this is a Department of Energy conference, anyone who creates visualizations for advanced scientific discovery is eligible to win an award.  Attendance is not required to win.  You can find submission instructions on the SciDAC 2010 web site.

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Wired Magazine has rounded up the winners of the SciDAC2009 Visualization Night awards, and has pictures and their videos (where possible) onlien for your viewing pleasure.

Some of the most impressive images in science are produced when researchers take numerical data and represent it visually through modeling and computer graphics. The Department of Energy honored 10 of this year’s best scientific visualizations with its annual SciDAC Vis Night awards, at the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing conference SciDAC in June. Researchers submitted visualizations to the contest, and program participants voted on the best of the best. From earthquakes to jet flames, this gallery of videos and images show how beautiful and descriptive visual data can be.

Disclaimer: I was on the team that did the Kevlar Penetration (shown above, video not available) and the “Breaking Waves” video on the site.

via Best Science Visualization Videos of 2009 | Wired Science | Wired.com.

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I contacted my friends in the Department of Energy (organizers of the SciDAC Conference) and got a complete list of winners at the SciDAC Visualization Night.

The winners:

• The Big One, a simulated 7.8 earthquake in Southern California, produced by Amit Chourasia, Kim Olsen, Steven Day, Luis Dalguer, Yifeng Cui, Jing Zhu, David Okaya, Phil Maechling and Thomas H. Jordan.
• Five Years of the Breaking Waves Simulation, a compilation showing the evolution of the “Breaking Waves” simulation, produced by Douglas Dommermuth, Thomas O’Shea, Paul Adams and Randall Hand.
• GEOS-5 Seasonal CO2 Flux, the Goddard Earth Observing System Model v. 5 showing seasonal CO2 buildup and reduction in North America, produced by Jamison Daniel and David Erickson.
• ImageVis 3D, a new volume-rendering program developed by the NIH/NCRR Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing, produced by Jens Kruger and Tom Fogal.
• Impact of a Copper Bullet on six Layers of Harness Satin Weave Kevlar Fabric, produced by Eric Fahrenthold, Moss Chimek, Kwon Joong Son, April Bohannan, Randall Hand and Kevin George.
• A Lifted Ethylene-Air Jet Flame Stabilized by the Interaction between a Fuel Jet and the Surrounding Preheated Air, produced by Jacqueline H. Chen, Kwan-Liu Ma, Hongfeng Yu, Ray W. grout, Chaoli Wang, Chun Sang Yoo, Edward Richardson and Ramanan Sankaran.
• Simulation of Non-Newtonian Suspensions: Shear Thinning Case, which shows how suspensions such as concrete or paint react as strain is applied, produced by William George, Nicos Martys, Steven Satterfield, John Hagedorn, Marc Olano and Judith Terrill.
• Simulation of the Gravitationally Confined Detonation Model of Type Ia Supernovae for Ignition at Multiple Points, produced by Brad Gallagher, George Jordan, Dean Townsley, Robert Fisher, Nathan Hearn, Jim Truan and Don Lamb.
• Turbulent Flow of Coolant in an Advanced Recycling Nuclear Reactor, produced by Hank Childs, Paul Fischer, Aleks Obabko, Dave Pointer and Andrew Siegel.
• Visualization of Electron-Scale Turbulence in Strongly Shaped Fusion Plasma, produced by Chris Ho, Chad Jones, Kwan-Liu Ma and Stephane Ethier.

via DOE – Science – ASCR – Homepage.

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Following on the news of Argonne’s victory at SciDAC, the HPCMP DAAC (High Performance Computing Modernization Program, Data Analysis and Assessment Center) also won 2 OASCR’s:

• Five Years of Breaking Waves
• Impact of a fragment on 6-layers of Kevlar

You can see these visualizations and many more at the DAAC Visualization Gallery.The DAAC is known for its use of high-end postprocessing tools (3dsMax, AfterEffects) to create visuals far beyond the use of most visualization scientists in the DoD, and these awards prove it.

PS: OASCR stands for, I’m told, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing & Research.

PPS: In the nature of full disclosure, I am an employee of the HPCMP DAAC.  I have the two awards next to my desk :)

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At the recent SciDAC conference in San Diego, 10 videos won awards at the Electronic Visualization and Poster Night.  One of those awards went to Argonne for their “Turbulent Flow of Coolant in an Advanced Nuclear Reactor”.

Both the visualizations and the computer runs for the winning entries were done at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). The computations were carried out on one of the world’s fastest and most energy-efficient supercomputers: Intrepid, Argonne’s IBM Blue Gene/P. The visualizations were performed on Eureka with software developed at Argonne. Eureka is also located at the ALCF and is one of the world’s largest graphics processing units, providing more than 111 teraflops and over 3.2 terabytes of RAM.

You can download the video here.

via HPCwire: Argonne Recognized During Visual Celebration.

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HPCWire is carrying a story that a group of researchers have pushed VisIt into record-breaking territory by running visualizations of 500billion to 2trillion gridpoint datasets (that’s 2-terapoints in size).

The team ran VisIt using 8,000 to 32,000 processing cores to tackle datasets ranging from 500 billion to 2 trillion zones, or grid points. The project was a collaboration among leading visualization researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Seems a good portion of the Department of Energy‘s Visualization staff was involved: Wes Bethel, Sean Ahern, Mark Howison, Dave Pugmire, and others.

The test runs created three-dimensional grids ranging from 512 x 512 x 512 “zones” or sample points up to approximately 10,000 x 10,000 x 10,000 samples for 1 trillion zones and approximately 12,500 x 12,500 x 12,500 to achieve 2 trillion grid points.

“This level of grid resolution, while uncommon today, is anticipated to be commonplace in the near future,” said Ahern. “A primary objective for our SciDAC Center is to be well prepared to tackle tomorrow’s scientific data understanding challenges.”

The tests consisted of isosurfaces and volume renderings.  While they don’t mention the results of the tests, they did carefully monitor them and collect benchmarking data that can be used in further development of VisIt.

Click the banner image above for larger Volume Rendering from the test.

via HPCwire: DOE Researchers Test Limits of Visualization Tool.

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Continuing today’s conference updates, SciDAC2009 registration is open.  The conference will be in San Diego, CA June 14-18th and showcase the work of the various Department of Energy labs.

The SciDAC 2009 conference will bring together more than 350 scientists for four days of technical and scientific talks, poster sessions and informal discussions. The general chair is Horst Simon, Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

SciDAC 2009.

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