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UKHEC Seminar |
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Speakers
Provisional Programme
Full DescriptionsLarge-Scale Scientific Visualizationby Charles Hansen, Interaction with complex, multidimensional data is now recognized as a critical analysis component in many areas, including computational fluid dynamics, computational combustion, and computational mechanics. Modern high performance computers have speeds measured in teraflops and handle dataset sizes measured in terabytes. Although these machines offer enormous potential for solving very large-scale realistic modeling, simulation, and optimization problems, their effectiveness will hinge upon the ability of human experts to interact with their computations and extract useful information. Since humans interact most naturally in a 3D world and since much of the data in important computational problems has a fundamental 3D spatial component, the greatest potential for this human/machine partnership will come through the use of 3D interactive visualization technologies.
Our research at the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute
at the university of Utah has focused on innovative, scalable
techniques for large-scale 3D visualization. In this talk, I will
discuss our contributions to visualization techniques in high
performance visualization technology, including scalable visualization
software, multi-field visualization, and interaction and immersion
techniques.
Computational Steering and Problem Solving Environmentsby Nick Avis, This presentation will outline the experiences of conducting experiments involving distributed computing, computational steering and human scale visualization facilities. The architecture of a computational steering environment will be analysed together with some informal findings of update rates associated both with the visual content and the functional simulation updates.
Two Heads are Better than One – How to Visualize Collaborativelyby Ken Brodlie, Visualization can benefit from collaboration. Although most visualization systems were designed for the single-user, there is a growing body of experience now in using them in a collaborative manner. A variety of approaches is emerging, and this talk will aim to develop a reference model for collaborative visualization against which the particular approaches can be compared. Some of the tools currently available for each approach will be discussed. The talk will also describe some of our practical experiences in visualizing collaboratively at local, national and international levels.
Volume Graphics: A Tool for High End Visualizationby Min Chen, Volume graphics is a newly emerged sub-field in computer graphics, and it is concerned with graphics scenes defined in volume data types, where a model is specified by a mass of points instead of a collection of surfaces. As true 3D representations, volume data types possess more descriptive power than surface data types, and are morphologically closer to many high-level modeling schemes in traditional surface graphics such as implicit surfaces and volume sweeping. More importantly, volume graphics offers a consistent solution to the primary deficiencies of surface graphics, which include its inability to encapsulate the internal description of a model, and the difficulties in rendering amorphous phenomena. The rendering of volume data types usually involves a discretisation process in the object space. High quality rendering, which relies on high sampling resolution, is usually time-consuming and often space-consuming. This talk will discuss the HPC needs of volume graphics and
its applications. It will give a brief review of the parallelisation
strategies commonly used in volume rendering, and will
discuss how these strategies can be deployed in volume graphics.
Visualization Systems for Diverse Environmentsby Julian Gallop, Compared with a few years ago, users and application designers can
now take advantage of a diversity of types of computing hardware.
High performance machines are in many cases massively parallel. The
Grid is becoming available as a resource that can be plugged into.
Mobile technologies are available, but how a mobile device would be
used with non-mobile resources is less clear. Alongside this, data
analysis requirements are becoming more complex. The consequences of
all this for visualization systems are explored and some examples are
summarised.
Visualization across Desktop and Virtual Reality Devicesby Helen Wright, Visualization is nowadays an intrinsic part of scientific computation, with graphical representation of simulation data giving the insight needed to assess results and postulate new models. Whether these results are produced on-line from the simulation as in computational steering, or post-processed after the program has finished, the need to interact with the graphics output is an essential part of the visualization process. Graphics workstations with mouse and keyboard provide a commodity mechanism for visualization and interaction but more expensive items such as wall-sized screens and immersive devices tend to be provided within central facilities and have specialised inputs using wand and glove. Providing visualization tools that are flexible enough to be used across a diverse range of hardware is thus a challenging problem. This talk will describe work carried out to harmonise the input and output mechanisms used in visualization, as part of our overall aim to provide graphics processing transparently across a variety of equipment.
The navigation of information spacesby Robert Spence, Information spaces are used for many purposes: online shopping, fraud detection, information visualization . . . . . the list is long. Often, in the course of a working session, as many as 100 or even many more movements will be involved within an information space that, almost by definition, is unknown. Since the economic repercussions of being able to navigate an efficient path through a largely unknown information space are often considerable, that space must be so designed as to provide, at any stage, answers to two questions: "Where can I usefully go?" and "How do I get there?" What is needed is a framework for navigation that can inform the interaction designer. The lecture will describe such a framework, and the manner in which the framework can influence interaction design will be illustrated by examples.
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