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.
TACC’s Kelly Gaither gave a nice presentation in the Dell booth at SC on the trials and tribulations of performing data analysis and visualization “At scale”. In her context, “at scale” means on large HPC-scale datasets.
Visualization is one of the most important and commonly used methods of analyzing and interpreting digital assets. For many types of computational research, it is the only viable means of extracting information and developing understanding from data. However, non-visual data analysis techniques—statistical analysis, data mining, data reduction, etc.—also play integral roles in many areas of knowledge discovery.
TACC is using technology that I’ve begun deploying at my employer combining dedicated visualization resources with large-shared filesystems (eliminating file transfers) and client-server tools. Her talk focuses on their software (Longhorn Portal) & hardware (Longhorn & Stallion) deployments, unfortunately lacking much detail on Impact of the system beyond fuzzy “works great” remarks. It’s a good talk if you’re unfamiliar with the problems of interactive visualization at the tera/petascale, and Kelly is always fun to listen to.
The current issue of Popular Science, the November 2011 issue, is all about the incredible quantities and capabilities of data and visualization. With several articles from big names like Seth Loyd, and visualizations from guys like Jan Willem Tulp and Jer Thorp, it’s sure to be a winner.
One of US President Obama’s platforms during the election battle was to add several degrees of transparency to government, embracing open standards and visualization. Last week at the Tech@State event there was lots of discussion on the topic, and an article on NextGov recaps their progress and some of the attempts underway.
Several projects have recently been launched, including a map of sexual orientation and gender identity issues in South and Central Asia and another map charting specific incidents of anti-Semitism in Europe by country. Since the site is part of the Open Government Initiative, all data is in the public domain and made embeddable for easier sharing.
I still remember my old Geocities account.. My first experiments with HTML, full of frames, tables, and blink tags. And I wasn’t alone, millions of people cut their teeth on the web via Geocities pages that broke every design rule and tricked browsers into going far beyond their design intent. Sadly (thankfully?) Geocities is gone, replaced by MySpace, FaceBook, and Twitter, but before it disappeared one group decided to mine it. This video is the result of their massive 650Gig dataset, visualized as a City.
In an heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bittorrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.
This Friday the US State Department will be hosting a data visualization conference at “Tech@State”, and the event is free and open to the public. Why might you care? Check out the impressive speaker list, with a Keynote from Edward Tufte himself.
The first day of the event, Friday, September 23 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., will be held in the Atrium and Foyers at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, 2700 F Street NW, Washington, DC 20566. It will feature government and non-government speakers and data visualization experts assembled from throughout the nation. The second day, Saturday, September 24 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., will take place at the Microsoft Innovation and Policy Center, 901 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20001, and will feature an all-day “unconference,” at which attendees will generate their own agenda based on the interests and expertise of the crowd.
While the event is free & open, it is a limited number of attendees so registration is required. If you’ll be in the DC area this weekend, check it out!
We’ve talked about the impressive “Allosphere” before, the three story aluminum sphere with lots of high definition 3D projections, 128 channels of audio, and more. A new press release at Nanotechnology Now gets into the details of some of the projects using the new tech, including a great simulation of the human body build from a combination of high-resolution scans and simulations.
We are in the process of building our fluid dynamics simulation to get the precise blood flow down the arteries and veins. Then we will get the nano particle geometries from our materials scientists and build a particle simulator so they will be able to run various tests virtually,” said Kuchera-Morin.
Visualizing.org has a neat twitter visualization online of 1645 twitter accounts related to information visualization. Taking a short list of seed accounts and then finding all their followers and friends, the result is an impressive (if not a bit crowded) graph visualization. Some edge bundling would have been nice, but you can get a rough idea of the connectivity just from the sheer number of connections.
I’m proud to see @VizWorld on the map as a rather prominent bubble near the upper-right area.
InsideHPC has a nice short interview with NCSA’s Mark Van Moer about his work with HPC simulation experts on data visualization.
NCSA visualization programmer Mark Van Moer describes how he and Dave Bock work with scientists to transform large amounts of numerical data into images so people can use their ‘visual intuition’ to better grasp what the data mean.
This is the same stuff I do at work every day.. Glad to see it getting some exposure.
The recent Spring 2011 issue of “HPCsource”, a supplement of Scientific Computing, focuses entirely on Visualization including articles on GPGPU programming, Remote 3D Viz, interviews with experts like Kelly Gaither of TACC, and much more. The online digital version includes videos of several parts, but the whole magazine is available in a downloadable PDF.
The issue is sponsored by Dell, so you’ll have to put up with several full-page Dell ads for hardware and services, but the articles look really interesting.
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.
TACC’s Kelly Gaither gave a nice presentation in the Dell booth at SC on the trials and tribulations of performing data analysis and visualization “At scale”. In her context, “at scale” means on large HPC-scale datasets.
One of US President Obama’s platforms during the election battle was to add several degrees of transparency to government, embracing open standards and visualization. Last week at the Tech@State event there was lots of discussion on the topic, and an article on NextGov recaps their progress and some of the attempts underway.
I still remember my old Geocities account.. My first experiments with HTML, full of frames, tables, and blink tags. And I wasn’t alone, millions of people cut their teeth on the web via Geocities pages that broke every design rule and tricked browsers into going far beyond their design intent. Sadly (thankfully?) Geocities is gone, replaced by MySpace, FaceBook, and Twitter, but before it disappeared one group decided to mine it. This video is the result of their massive 650Gig dataset, visualized as a City.
This Friday the US State Department will be hosting a data visualization conference at “Tech@State”, and the event is free and open to the public. Why might you care? Check out the impressive 
We’ve talked about the impressive “
The recent Spring 2011 issue of “HPCsource”, a supplement of Scientific Computing, focuses entirely on Visualization including articles on GPGPU programming, Remote 3D Viz, interviews with experts like Kelly Gaither of TACC, and much more. The online digital version includes videos of several parts, but the whole magazine is available in a downloadable PDF.
VizWorld.com 
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