OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Sept. 28 -- The University of Tennessee (UT) will receive $10 million from the National Science Foundation over four years to establish a new, state-of-the-art visualization and data analysis center aimed at interpreting the massive amounts of data produced by today's most powerful supercomputers.

The TeraGrid eXtreme Digital Resources for Science and Engineering (XD) award will be used to fund UT's Center for Remote Data Analysis and Visualization (RDAV), a partnership between UT, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Wisconsin, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

"For a scientist, visualization is more than just generating pretty pictures," said ORNL/UT Astrophysicist Bronson Messer. "As our simulations grow larger and larger, visualization and the associated data analysis are absolutely essential in producing scientific insight from computation."

To address this need, RDAV will provide remote visualization and image generation, data and statistical analysis, workflow systems, and a variety of software services, making it a leading visualization and data analysis center with the nation's broadest user community.

Much of RDAV will rely on a new machine named Nautilus that employs the SGI shared-memory processing architecture. The machine will feature 1,024 cores, 4,096 gigabytes of memory, and 16 graphics processing units. The new SGI system can independently scale processor count, memory, and I/O to very large levels in a single system running standard Linux.  This flexibility will allow the RDAV team to configure a system uniquely capable of analyzing and visualizing petascale data sets, promising TeraGrid users new levels of scientific understanding.

Nautilus will be used for three major tasks: visualizing data results from computer simulations with many complex variables, such as weather or climate modeling; analyzing large amounts of data coming from experimental facilities like ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source; and aggregating and interpreting input from a large number of sensors distributed over a wide geographic region. The computer will also have the capability to study large bodies of text and aggregations of documents.

"I believe this will be the largest shared-memory machine for analysis on the planet," said the project's Principal Investigator (PI) Sean Ahern, who is currently the visualization task lead at ORNL and will serve as director of RDAV. "No one has ever done this before. The new system will handle data analysis algorithms that can't be deployed on more traditional distributed memory systems."

Shared-memory processing can be even more useful than the world's most powerful computers for certain tasks, especially those aimed at visualization and data analysis. The system will be complemented with a 1 petabyte file system and will be fully connected to the TeraGrid, the nation's largest computational network for open scientific research.

RDAV will also feature a support staff of visualization and data analysis experts adept at aiding researchers in interpreting their results and incorporating and developing new capabilities for understanding data.

TeraGrid XD is the next phase in the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) ongoing effort to build a cyberinfrastructure that delivers high-end digital services, providing American researchers and educators with the capability to work with extremely large amounts of digitally represented information.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas also received an XD award to operate another visualization and data analysis center.

"For many types of research, visualization provides the only means of extracting the information to understand complex scientific data," said Barry Schneider, program director in the NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure. "The two awards, one to the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the other to NICS at the University of Tennessee, will be deploying new and complementary computational platforms to address these challenges." 

RDAV will be fully leveraged with the resources of the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), an NSF-funded organization managed by UT and home to Kraken, the world's fastest supercomputer operated by an academic institution. RDAV will begin full operations in the second quarter of 2010 and will be housed at NICS.

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Source: University of Tennessee