HPCwire: The Yin and Yang of Understanding Data

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Features

November 03, 2006

The Yin and Yang of Understanding Data

Page: 1 of 3
1 | 2 | 3 All »

When the Department of Energy's Office of Science announced the latest round of awards in the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program in September, the funded projects included a new Center for Enabling Technologies that will focus on meeting the visualization and analytics needs of scientists. Called the SciDAC Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies, or VACET, the project will be co-led by Wes Bethel, head of the Visualization Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Chris Johnson, director of the Scientific Computing Institute of the University of Utah. The VACET team also includes researchers at Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge national laboratories, the University of Utah and the University of California at Davis.

At the upcoming SC06 conference in Tampa, Bethel will give an overview and discuss the objectives of VACET in a talk at the LBNL booth (1812) at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 15. In the runup to SC06, Bethel took some time to talk about the field of analytics, how it contributes to computational science and where the fields of analytics and visualization are headed.

Question: First of all, how did the team for your SciDAC project come together?

Bethel: We wanted to strike a balance where we have members with research and production backgrounds. The result is a team with members from well-known university and DOE laboratory research programs along with representation from DOE's production visualization programs. This kind of blend will assure that we have top-quality research and development as well as the means to deploy the new technology at the computational facilities where the data will be computed, collected, stored and made available to distributed teams of SciDAC science researchers.

Chris Johnson from the University of Utah and myself share leadership duties of this project. Our team consists of Valerio Pascucci, Hank Childs and Peer-Timo Bremer from LLNL; Ken Joy and Bernd Hamann from UC Davis; Chris Johnson, Chuck Hansen, Claudio Silva, Steve Parker, Allen Sanderson, Xavier Tricoche and Marty Cole from the University of Utah; Sean Ahern, George Ostrouchov, and Jeremy Meredith from Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and of course Cristina Siegerist and myself from Berkeley Lab.

Every person on this team is "a superstar." In four of the past eight years, members of this team have authored or co-authored Best Paper Award-winning papers at the IEEE Visualization conference. All have an impeccable record of publications and are recognized leaders in the field. But not only that, this team has architected and developed a vast amount of visualization software that has had a broad impact in DOE and NSF science and research programs. Not only are they first-class professionals, they are also fun to hang out with. One thing that is special about this team is that we all get along great. This combination really makes this team special to me. I'm honored to be working with such a great bunch of people.

Q: Last year, SC05 incorporated analytics into the conference program and this year, DOE agreed to fund your proposal to establish a center for analytics and visualization. Clearly, it's an emerging field. What's your definition of analytics and how does it fit into HPC?

Bethel: That's a question that reminds me of freshman philosophy class and the question, "What is love?" You can give a number of examples, but it's hard to define.

We can start by defining scientific visualization, which is the process of creating images from abstract scientific data. Analytics has been described as the science of analytical reasoning. To me, analytical reasoning means being able to draw conclusions based on hypothesis testing and the exploration of large, complex and occasionally incomplete data. Visual analytics is a way of facilitating such research through the use of interactive visual interfaces. Visualization and analytics are complementary technologies with no clearly defined boundary between them. Visualization helps accelerate analytics by relying on humans' vast cognitive processing abilities, the "yin" side of data understanding. Analytics gives hard, quantifiable measures, and is the "yang" side of data understanding.

An example of analytics could be how the California Department of Forestry responds when a forest fire is reported. Their incident response is based on figuring out what's wrong, what they need to do and what resources they have to do that. In simulation science, lives and property may not be at stake, but there can be substantially more data involved. For example, policy makers want to understand how greenhouse gas emissions at various levels will impact global climate. Climate scientists study this question by performing lots of simulation runs where they vary the input parameters to the simulation. Visualization and analytics are tools for discovering relationships between cause and effect in a highly complex system that produces many terabytes worth of data. Neither of these is really a complete "definition of analytics," but both are examples of how analytics is put into practice to solve complex problems.

Page: 1 of 3
1 | 2 | 3 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html