HPCwire: NCSA Visualizations to be Shown at SIGGRAPH, DomeFest

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June 10, 2005

NCSA Visualizations to be Shown at SIGGRAPH, DomeFest

High-resolution, data-driven visualizations showing the evolution of the universe and the development of a destructive supertwister that were created at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications will be viewed by thousands of people this summer at SIGGRAPH 2005 and DomeFest 2005.

"These projects are entertaining and exciting, but they're also a form of informal science education and a way to make state-of-the-art technology and cutting-edge science accessible to everyone," said Donna Cox, director of NCSA's Visualization and Experimental Technology Division and chair of the Emerging Technologies exhibition at SIGGRAPH 2005.

The SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival has been called "the Academy Awards of computer graphics." The annual conference and exhibition spotlights cutting-edge graphics and interactive technology and features the best in computer graphics from Hollywood, industry, academia, and independent artists.

The SIGGRAPH 2005 Electronic Theater will feature NCSA's visualization of an F3 tornado within a simulated supercell thunderstorm. University of Illinois atmospheric scientists, led by NCSA chief science officer Robert Willhelmson, first used NCSA's high-performance computers to simulate the birth of a tornado. The initial data for the simulation was based on the actual environmental conditions that produced an F4 tornado that devastated South Dakota with winds in excess of 200 mph. In the simulation, these conditions produced a severe F3 tornado capable of uprooting trees, ripping the roofs from homes, and overturning trains.

The calculations generated 1 terabyte of data, which NCSA's visualization team translated into a dynamic, high-definition animated visualization of the tornado's birth and growth.

Visualization team members collaborating on the piece were Alex Betts, Cox, Matthew Hall, Stuart Levy, and Robert Patterson. Levy created the trajectory data that was used to locate the tornado with a swirling mass of spheres and the streamtubes that represent the geometry of the airflow. Hall generated the isosurfaces representing the body of the thunderstorm, as well as the cones at the ground plane that show wind speed and direction. Betts created a software plug-in for the animation authoring package called Maya, which enabled the reading of the HDF data, trajectories, and geometric isosurfaces. Patterson then used Maya and the NCSA data plug-in to integrate all of the pieces. He was responsible for choreographing the final scene, which included both volume and geometric rendering.

Recently Levy enabled a system for rendering images for a variety of planetarium dome configurations, which involves rendering numerous camera views and blending them into a hemispherical dome image.

Also shown during the Computer Animation Festival will be a selection of the world's best full-dome animations from DomeFest 2005, including three animations produced at NCSA. The DomeFest animations will be screened daily on a 9-meter digital dome assembled especially for SIGGRAPH 2005.

DomeFest is the only festival in the world dedicated to dome-work, incorporating video, animation, art, and technology in a fully immersive experience. Pieces of four minutes or less were chosen by a world-class jury for inclusion in the festival, which will kick off July 15 at the LodeStar Astronomy Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and will then travel to national and international screenings.

NCSA's contributions to DomeFest are:

The visualization of an F3 tornado within a supercell thunderstorm simulation.
"Evolution of the Universe: Galaxies Forming on a Filamentary Structure." This visualization is the product of a collaboration between NCSA and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, where a team of astrophysicists led by Mike Norman (University of California, San Diego) completed the most highly defined spatial and temporal simulation of the universe using more than 10,000 CPU hours on the center's TeraGrid computational resources. The calculation involved 2,000 simulated snapshots of a wide expanse of the universeapproximately 250 million light years across. Each snapshot signifies the passage of 6.8 million years, to encompass the nearly 14 billion years from the Big Bang to the present. The 26 terabytes of data generated by the simulation were mirrored to the TeraGrid system at NCSA, where the visualization team used the data to create a breathtaking visualization of the origin and evolution of the universe. Members of the NCSA visualization team collaborating on this project include Betts, Cox, Levy, and Patterson, with assistance from Steve Cutchin and Amit Chourasia at SDSC. Betts created a plug-in for SDSC's VISTA volume renderer, which enhanced VISTA's capabilities with those of Maya, adding color mapping, choreography, and the ability to mix geometry-rendering with volume-rendering.
An excerpt from "Black Hole: The Other Side of Infinity." For this project, funded by the National Science Foundation, NCSA is creating a planetarium dome show to be debut at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and visualizations for a PBS NOVA show. A team led by Andrea Ghez (University of California Los Angeles) observed the orbital motion of 15 bright stars in the inner core of the Milky Way, yielding the best evidence yet that the center of our galaxy contains a massive black hole. Drawing on this data, the NCSA visualization team has created an animation that approaches the galactic center of the Milky Way, showing stellar orbits around the black hole. The visualization shows 150 years of the stars' simulated motion along the reconstructed orbits, embedded in a 3D modelpartly artistic, partly science-basedof the inner Milky Way. The tour begins about 2 light years from the black hole and approaches to within 1/30th of a light year. Members of the NCSA visualization team collaborating on this project include Cox, Patterson, Lorne Leonard, and Levy. Leonard and Levy worked with the Ghez team on the stellar orbit data, while Patterson choreographed the scene and integrated it with the galactic center model.

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