VizWorld.com

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.

Graphics, Science hpc, scidac, sciviz

The latest issue of Scientific Computing World has a nice 3-page article on Scientific Visualization, based on some classes and tutorials at recent events.  They start off with a typical SciVis pipeline (Kudos to them for actually including “postprocess” after Render, so many groups stop at Render), and discuss several commercial and freely available package ranging from IDL to VTK.

If you’re already a SciVis guru then you probably won’t get much from it, but it’s a great article for scientists or newcomers to see what’s available.

SCW_JUNJUL11.

Science magazine, scientific visualization, sciviz

Discovery magazine has collected a few beautiful images generated from large supercomputing simulations into a short 6-image gallery.  Covering DOE astronomical simulations (shown), ITER fusion simulations, the ORNL supernova graphics, and much more, it’s the very definition of ‘viz porn’.

Beautifully Detailed Supercomputer Simulations | Technology | DISCOVER Magazine via InsideHPC.

Science sciviz, visualization

ISGTW has a story about the search for neutrinos at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, with some detail on the various types of neutrinos and the problems in finding them.  In particular, the Japanese attempt to find the ‘theta13′ neutrino via the T2K experiment.

The likelihood that a scientist will see a particular type of neutrino changes periodically over time, oscillating like the rise and fall of a merry-go-round. Three different constant angles determine the rate at which those probabilities oscillate. Scientists have already seen muon and tau neutrino oscillation, and measured two of the three angles. The third angle, theta13, is much tricker to measure, however, because it is very small. And that’s where the Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) experiment in Japan comes into the picture.

The image above is the first T2K event seen in Super-Kamiokande (the name of the Japanese Accelerator), where each dot is a photo multiplier tube that detected light.

via Feature – A neutrino’s journey: From accelerator to analysis.

Science physics, sciviz

Showcasing the power of the new Safari4 Javascript engine, someone has built a Navier-Stokes equation solver that runs entirely in JavaScript.  Simply select the resolution & solver iterations (The default work nicely) then start clicking in the big black box.  You can start & stop the simulation, and click the “Toggle drawing mode” to switch between flow glyphs and surface visualizations.  The image above was rendered with the simulation on FireFox3.5 beta, running at 5-6fps.

The surface visualizations also allow you to add “density sources” which create some impressive flow visualization effects.  Is this the future of simulation/visualization on the web?  I doubt it, but it’s pretty kewl either way.

Oliver’s simple fluid dynamics simulator.

Science javascript, sciviz, simulation

At the recent CCGrid09, a conference for cluster and grid computing, the LSU Center for Computation and Technology (CCT) won the SCALE2009 challence with an interactive system to simulate and visualize black holes and their gravitational physics.

The demonstration showed live, interactive images of the black hole data using a scientific visualization system distributed across LONI. The CCT group built tangible interaction devices, which they provided on the show floor in Shanghai, allowing observers to interact in real-time with the visualization process.

They ran the simulation on TACC’s Ranger system, using 2048 cores.  As an extra “fun” bonus, they managed to connect the simulation to social networks so that it could announce runtime information via Twitter and post real-time images of the simulation to Flickr.  Videos of the simulation can be seen at the CactusCode site.

via Dr. Dobb’s | Black Hole Simulation Wins SCALE 2009 Challenge | May 29, 2009.

Science blackhole, contest, lsu, scale2009, sciviz

Mashable has a great roundup of five iphone visualization tools.  Only some of them are Info or Data Visualization related, with the rest being Augmented reality and audio visualization tools.

Data Visualizations: 5 Amazing iPhone Visualization Videos.

Graphics, Hardware, Science augmented reality, infovis, iphone, roambi, sciviz, ziosoft