2008 Workshop on Ultrascale Visualization

The ever-increasing sizes of data produced from a variety of scientific studies post a formidable challenge for the subsequent data analysis and visualization tasks. While steady advances in graphics hardware enable faster rendering, achieving interactive visualization of large data must also rely on effective data filtering and organization. In many cases, the best interactivity can only be obtai... View full abstract»

With the dramatic increases in simulation complexity and resolution comes an equally dramatic challenge for resources, both computational and storage, needed to facilitate analysis and understanding of the results. Traditionally these needs have been met by powerful workstations equipped with sophisticated analysis tools and special purpose visualization hardware. More and more these personal comp... View full abstract»

Computational science's march toward the petascale demands innovations in analysis and visualization of the resulting datasets. As scientists generate terabyte and petabyte data, it is insufficient to measure the performance of visual analysis algorithms by rendering speed only, because performance is dominated by data movement. We take a systemwide view in analyzing the performance of software vo... View full abstract»

With the advent of the first petascale supercomputer, Los Alamos's Roadrunner, there is a pressing need to address how to visualize petascale data. The crux of the petascale visualization performance problem is interactive rendering, since it is the most computationally intensive portion of the visualization process. For terascale platforms, commodity clusters with graphics processors (GPUs) have ... View full abstract»

As bioinformatics has evolved from a reductionistic approach to a complementary multi-scale integrative approach, new challenges in ultra-scale visualization have arisen. Even though visualization is a critical component to large-scale biological data analysis, the ultra-scale nature of systems biology has given rise to novel problems in visualization that are not addressed by existing methods. Vi... View full abstract»

Analyzing shock physics, which can involve high energies, high velocity materials, and highly variable results, is challenging. Very little can be measured during a shock physics experiment. Most experimental data is collected in the aftermath. High-fidelity simulations using codes like CTH are possible, but require a significant amount of post processing to properly understand the results. Physic... View full abstract»

This paper describes the motivation and capabilities of SAGE- the scalable adaptive graphics environment- a middleware and software client for supporting ultra resolution collaboration and visualization. View full abstract»

Scientific data processing and visualization of computational simulation data have played an important role in knowledge creation, and its transfer for the benefit of society, through scientific discovery and understanding of physical and chemical phenomena. Massively parallel processing architecture has greatly contributed to increase the computational power and to enlarge the scale of computatio... View full abstract»