HPCwire: ECU Visualization Challenge Shows Power of Imagery

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

Leading HPC
Solution Providers

HPCwire >> Topic >> Visualization

May 02, 2008

ECU Visualization Challenge Shows Power of Imagery

Donna Kain and Miriam Wildeman

GREENVILLE, N.C., May 1 -- The first-ever East Carolina University (ECU) Visualization Challenge brought a standing room only crowd to the campus on April 23, as eight students displayed their creative and technical abilities during a competition held by the RENCI at ECU Engagement Center and the Center for Coastal Systems Informatics and Modeling.

Additional sponsors for the event included the Coastal Maritime Council, the Center for Natural Hazards Research, the Thomas Harriott College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Geography's Center for GIS Science.

The call for challenge entries elicited projects ranging from the reconstruction of historic sailing craft to animated depictions of hurricane-induced flooding on the Outer Banks. The common thread uniting all the entries was implementation of the 20-foot x 6-foot visualization wall at the RENCI center. Thomas Allen, co-director of the Center for Geographic Information Science and director of technology for RENCI at ECU, served as facilitator for the project. Noting that ECU is the first RENCI partner institution to hold a visualization competition, Allen commented, "The students participating in this challenge have put the visualization wall through its paces more than any faculty members so far!"

Top honors went to Eric Ray, a graduate student in maritime studies, for his 3D reconstruction of the 18th century sloop Lady Washington, the first American flagship to round Cape Horn en route to the Pacific Northwest. The reconstruction is remarkable because no traces of the ship exist today -- the only surviving records of her appearance are a commemorative coin and a painting done by her first mate. Ray used Rhinoceros rapid prototyping software and a contemporary colonial shipbuilding manual to generate his images. Such reconstructions, Ray says, could be a valuable tool for museum outreach.

Erik Ray's visualization on the 20-foot x 6-foot visualization wall at RENCI at ECU
First runner-up Robert Howard, a graduate student in geological science, presented "Stormwater Runoff Response of Fornes Branch, Greenville, NC," which uses a hydrological model to predict the speed at which precipitation drains from a 2.5 km2 area of Greenville. Howard paired a soil permeability map with a graph of the predicted and actual runoff rates over time to predict areas where flooding will occur. He sees his work, still in its early stages, as potentially "enhancing the ability of the public to understand their own city."

Other Visualization Challenge participants were Chris Betancourt, graduate student in biology, with "Multi-Parameter Visualization Toolkit;" Nadine Kopf, graduate student, maritime studies, with "3D Photogrammetric Model of the Hjortspring Boat;" David Lagomasino, graduate student, geology, with "Time-Series Water Quality Profiles of the Tar-Pamlico River Estuary;" Suzanne McArdle and Garrett Nelson, graduate students, geography, with "Modeling Storm Surges for Communicating Hazards to the Public;" and Laurynas Gedminas, undergraduate, geography, with "Greenland Ice Sheet Meltdown." Allen introduced each contestant and presented the awards.

Tom Allen, technology director at RENCI at ECU, welcomes participants and spectators to the Visualization Challenge, held April 23 at RENCI's engagement center on the ECU campus.J.P. Walsh, a faculty member in geology, provided advice and support throughout the planning and staging of the competition. In the weeks before the event, graduate students from the geography department helped entrants become familiar with the workings of the visualization wall. Judges for the Challenge included Derek Alderman (geography), David Mallinson (geological science), David Stewart (maritime studies), Carl Twarog (art), and Sarat Kocherlakota (senior visualization researcher at RENCI).

Now that the challenge precedent has been set, the coming years should bring exciting developments in visualization work by ECU students, both graduate and undergraduate, in a widening array of fields. A statement in the National Science Foundation's Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge synopsis applies not to science alone, but to all areas of intellectual endeavor: "Some of science's most powerful statements are not made in words...To illustrate is, etymologically and actually, to enlighten."

-----

Source: RENCI

Article Tools

Share & Save Options

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

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

UPenn adds third state to nanowire storage; and UIUC is named the first CUDA Center of Excellence. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
Read More...

IBM Looks to Tap Massive Data Streams

Modern civilization is positively drenched in data, some of which needs to be dealt with in real time to be of any value. Businesses, especially in the financial industry, have long recognized this, and have been building custom systems to collect, analyze, and react to information as it is captured. IBM thinks the time is right to generalize these approaches into a new field of computing -- and a new business -- it calls stream computing.
Read More...

Gravity Attracts a GigE HPC Cluster

Not all supercomputing rides on InfiniBand or proprietary interconnects. For technical applications that decompose neatly into loosely-coupled threads, a big cluster with vanilla Gigabit Ethernet does just fine. The top Ethernet system on the TOP500 list -- at number 58 -- is the new ATLAS cluster at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

San Diego Gets Set for Storage Explosion

Jul 03 | Byte and Switch | The San Diego Supercomputer Center, which provides much of the core storage for the TeraGrid, is overhauling its 28 petabyte storage system to support tremendous data growth. Read more...

Intel's Gelsinger Predicts Intel Inside Everything

Jul 03 | ExtremeTech | Intel exec Pat Gelsinger said he sees the Intel Architecture permeating virtually every segment of computing, as the company's microprocessors expand into more and more cores. Read more...

A Massively Parallel Future

Jul 03 | Bangkok Post | The latest programmable GPUs are starting to steal application cycles from CPUs. Read more...

UCSD Researchers Identify Potential Bird Flu Drugs

Jul 02 | UC San Diego News Center | With the help of resources at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD scientists have isolated more than two dozen promising compounds from which new “designer drugs” might be developed to combat the avian flu virus. Read more...

Implementing Multi-Core: The Devil Is in the Detail

Jul 02 | Chip Design Magazine | Dual- and quad-core processors barely scratch the surface of the potential of multi-core systems. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

New HPC White Paper: Star-P® Performance on IBM Linux Clusters

Jul 03 | | The paper explores some of the performance benefits of Star-P on commodity scalable systems such as IBM's Linux clusters based on multi-core Intel Xeon processors. The results demonstrate substantial performance gains with almost no programmer effort-roughly a 24-fold speed improvement for solving linear matrix equations. An overview of parallel computing with Star-P, a description of the performance test cases and description of IBM cluster configurations used for testing are also addressed.

Fast N-Body Simulation with CUDA C Compiler

Apr 17 | | An N-body simulation numerically approximates the evolution of a system of bodies in which each body continuously interacts with every other body, and it arises in many other computational science problems as well.

Improving Performance and Manageability for Seismic Processing and Imaging Applications with Parallel Storage

Jun 05 | | As pressure increases on the upstream seismic processing community to deliver ever-higher levels of productivity and efficiency, a new generation of storage solutions will be required that allow the maximum utilisation of high-performance computing (HPC) Linux cluster resources, together with the minimum of management overhead.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Podcast: Interview with Ben Bennett of ClearSpeed Technology

Today, HPC organizations are requiring substantially more floating point performance to solve real-world problems. In this podcast, Ben Bennett, ClearSpeed General Manager, discusses how acceleration technology can improve the overall performance of standard x86-based systems...