“I’m excited about working with our outstanding visualization team to develop seamless solutions for the complete analysis life-cycle that enable more effective scientific workflows independent of data size, data velocity and computing platform,” Navrátil said.

“Our aim is to make our users more effective in performing their science, whether analyzing the data from a ten thousand-core weather model or a ten thousand time-step molecular simulation, and whether they are using a high-resolution tiled display or a smart phone,” he said. “We also will leverage advancements in virtual reality and augmented reality technologies to improve analytic capabilities. The future outlook is very exciting.”

In his new role, Navrátil will continue to advance in situ visualization techniques, where the analysis runs at the same time as the simulation, for large-scale data to cope with the widening gap between a simulation’s ability to generate data compared to its ability to write the data to disk for later analysis.

Navrátil earned his doctorate, master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin as well as a bachelor’s degree in Plan II Honors from the university. He has authored numerous papers and publications on scientific data visualization, irregular algorithms, and parallel systems. His work has been featured in numerous venues, both nationally and internationally, including the New York Times, Discover, and PBS News Hour.

Kelly Gaither, who previously served as TACC’s Director of Visualization for 16 years, now has a joint appointment at the Dell Medical School (DMS) as an associate professor with the DMS Women’s Health research team. Gaither will remain as a director and senior research scientist at TACC and split her time between the two appointments.

“The words “Big Data” seem to be used ever more frequently, but the best way for many humans to interpret large amounts of data is to *look* at a visual representation of it,” said TACC Executive Director Dan Stanzione. “Fundamentally, that’s what visualization is about — trying to take the very large and complicated datasets that come from modern scientific computing, and turn them into something that people can understand and gain new insight from.”

“Visualization is a key component of advanced computing, and a critical part of the portfolio of activities at TACC,” Stanzione said. “We are amazingly fortunate to have someone of Paul’s talents bring his experience to this crucial area of the center, and we are also incredibly grateful to Kelly for so skillfully building this area of TACC over the last 15+ years, and look forward to her contributions from her new role in the Dell Medical School.”

TACC provides world-class high performance computing systems and cyberinfrastructure for the U.S. open science community, including deploying and operating since its inception in 2001 more than 15 NSF-funded supercomputers and advanced visualization systems for national programs. TACC’s visualization resources blend science, technology and art to bring the complexities of our world to life helping solve large-scale problems.

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Source: TACC