NCSA LENDS A HAND WITH “NOVA” EPISODE

November 17, 2000

SCIENCE & ENGINEERING NEWS

Champaign, IL — An upcoming episode of the PBS TV series “Nova” will show how artistic talent, cutting-edge visualization techniques, and solid scientific research can combine to help create a documentary that is both informative and entertaining.

The “Nova” episode, called “Runaway Universe,” will feature research data from members of the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) Cosmology team. The scientific data was integrated into the TV show as animated segments using the National Center for Supercomputing Application’s (NCSA) Virtual Director software. “Runaway Universe” was created in High Definition TV format (HDTV) and will air Nov. 21 at 9 p.m. EST (8 p.m. CST) on PBS stations across the country. Funding for the show was provided by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Informal Science Education to Brent Tully, a University of Hawaii researcher who collaborates with the Alliance Cosmology team, and by Nova.

“For me personally, the purpose of the grant and the show is to be able to bring to the public a dramatic display of the filamentary structure of the universe,” said Tully. “It is a great way to share with the public some very dramatic discoveries about the nature of the universe.”

Tully’s database of 35,000 observed galaxies was used to compose one animated sequence in the show. That sequence takes the viewer from the Earth, through the Milky Way, out to the Virgo Cluster and past nearby galaxies. The data then transitions into an animated voyage through large-scale cosmic structures drawn from simulations done by Alliance Cosmology team members Jeremiah Ostriker and Paul Bode of Princeton University. NCSA’s Virtual Director team transformed the data from Tully and the cosmology simulations from Ostriker and Bode into animated HDTV footage that captures the beauty and the mystery of a voyage through the cosmos.

Virtual Director is a software program created by Donna Cox, an NCSA researcher and professor in the University of Illinois School of Art and Design, Robert Patterson of NCSA, and Marcus Thiebaux of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. NCSA’s Stuart Levy maintains the software and extends its capabilities. Virtual Director allows researchers to navigate through complex scientific visualizations and record and edit their movements through the data with a virtual camera. In essence, the software allows the user to direct the simulation and create a movie.

Thomas Lucas, director and producer of “Runaway Universe,” said he and Tully had the idea of including a flight around the galaxies in the documentary, but it took the Virtual Director team to make the idea a reality.

“We had an idea, but the execution of that idea was through Bob, Donna, and Stuart,” said Lucas. “They put an enormous amount of time and effort into developing the techniques for doing these sequences. It was really a labor of love.”

Part of that effort involved remote collaboration between Patterson and Tully. Patterson worked from the Cave Automated Virtual Environment (CAVE) at NCSA and Tully from his desktop computer in Hawaii to track camera movements through his dataset and create animations in real-time. The process was a first for Tully, who said the use of VR and the Virtual Director software enhanced his ability to understand his data.

“That is the role of Virtual Director,” said Cox. “We help people present their data as animations that tell a story. It gives them a whole new way of looking at their data, and it makes that data accessible to many more people–in this case all the people who watch Nova.”

Another animated segment in “Runaway Universe” features data computed and simulated by Michael Norman, a member of the Alliance Cosmology team at the University of California, San Diego, using adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) techniques. Norman’s computer runs were massive, using 100,000 CPU hours on a 128-processor array of NCSA’s SGI Origin2000 supercomputer. The resulting one minute animation depicts the history of the universe from the big bang through star formation to the formation of a galaxy group, and ends with a “dive” into a galaxy. Levy worked with Norman to develop new techniques for rendering AMR data as animations. After completing a first run on the Origin and producing about 500 gigabytes of data, a second computer run was done. That run used AMR to take “snap shots” of the data at different points in time over the simulated history of the universe.

“We looked at some of the interesting details from the first run on the Origin2000 and then focused on some of those details for the second run,” explained Levy. “It is data from that second run that was used to create the animated sequence for Nova. ”

The Virtual Director team’s animated sequences were more challenging than most partly because astronomical phenomena – which involve gaseous materials that light can penetrate – are some of the most challenging scientific events to animate. In addition, the HDTV format requires much higher resolution than traditional television and therefore more data and rendering time.

“No commercial establishment would have taken on a project like this. They wouldn’t have the resources or the patience,” said Lucas.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading-edge site for the National Computational Science Alliance. NCSA is a leader in the development and deployment of cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. The National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, industrial partners, and other federal agencies fund NCSA.

The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century and includes more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners from across the United States. The Alliance is one of two partnerships funded by the National Science Foundation’s Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, and receives cost sharing at partner institutions. NSF also supports the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

============================================================

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire