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The Graphics Special Interest Group (GSIG) held its open meeting during the San Jose Cray User Group meeting at
5:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 8, 1997. Turnout was less than anticipated, but
several lively discussions occurred nevertheless. There was
representation from diverse sites with a range spanning the small and
large facilities. There were also a number of new attendees, an
encouraging sign in these changing times. Again, there is the need to
emphasize that these are OPEN meetings, with attendance encouraged of
anyone with an interest in graphics, visualization, and related areas.
Several very different areas of discussion were pursued. First up was
the next CUG meeting, which will be held in Stuttgart, Germany, next summer. There
is a great deal of interest in putting together a real-time, interactive,
collaborative demonstration during the conference. Several
ideas were brought forth and further discussion is anticipated via the
GSIG mail reflector (gsic-request@cug.org). If you are interested,
please use this e-mail address to join the group and participate in this
discussion. In addition, we will try to support live demonstrations for
presenters who may wish to incorporate such into their talks.
There is also still a need for a deputy chair from the European and
Asia/Pacific regions. The duties for this position are not overly
demanding--primarily to help identify potential speakers, chair
a session or two, and fill in for the chair when I am unable to attend
a meeting. If anyone is interested, or knows of someone who might be,
please have them contact me (leg@inel.gov) and I would be happy to
discuss it with them in greater detail. (I might throw in a little arm
twisting as well, but only for their own good!)
I would like to point those who may be interested at the several
URLs that pertain to the Graphics SIG. The first, of course, is the CUG
Web page (http://www.cug.org), from which links can be found to the many
related sites, including the Graphics SIG page
(http://persephone.inel.gov/CUG/GSIC.html). There is an e-mail expander
(gsic@cug.org) being maintained by Walter Wehinger at RUS. You may join
this list by sending mail to gsic-request@cug.org and you will be added
automatically.
There is still a lot of interest in the area of application steering.
This is being fostered not only by the continued increase in computing
power, but also by the close coupling of computation and visualization
provided by the new generation of Silicon Graphics/Cray Research hardware. Many sites are
acquiring Origin2000 systems with integral Infinite Reality
Engines. It will be interesting to see what is presented at the
next meeting, by which time users will have had some time to experiment
with these new systems. We should see not only an increase in the use of
traditional visualization techniques, but the opportunity for new
paradigms that may have been impractical until now.
Another area that received much discussion was that of immersive
visualization. Many sites have now installed, or are planning to
install, one of the various types of immersive visualization systems.
These systems have moved from the demonstration phase to that of a
productive tool for the computational workplace. As the core of these
types of systems have most often consisted of SGI rendering hardware
driven by supercomputers, the merging of SGI and Cray has provided even
more reason for many sites to combine or extend their existing systems to
encompass these new capabilities. Coupled with the ever increasing
network bandwidth available at more and more locations, the possibilities
for distributed, collaborative groups to work together more effectively
and efficiently than ever before will continue to expand.
CUG Video Theater
The CUG Video Theater was held at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, May 9, with support
for even more video formats than usual. This was due to the wonderful
support provided by Dave Robertson and the rest of the conference staff.
There were almost 50 people in attendance--quite a good turnout,
especially considering the early morning time slot and a number of
concurrently scheduled sessions. As mentioned in the e-mail proceeding
the conference, a record number of tapes were received prior to the
meeting. This guaranteed those sites a position in the program. Some of
the tapes that arrived at the conference were not shown due to the
limited time slot.
As we will again be having the Video Theater in
Stuttgart, I encourage you to submit your tapes as early as possible, or
at least contact me so that I can make sure they get shown. The tapes
shown this year included submissions from Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, EPA-NESC, MPG-IPP, Pittsburg Computing Center,
and San Diego Supercomputing Center. I will again try to produce a sampler of the tape submissions
for the Stuttgart meeting, provided I get sufficient material early
enough to do this. Please let me know if your site is interest in
participating and have the relevant parties do so.
Supercomputing Visualization Tutorial
Cal Kirchhof from SGI/Cray Research and Eric Greenwade from the
Idaho National Engineering Laboratory presented a tutorial on Supercomputing Visualization. The increased performance of supercomputing hardware has fueled a
dramatic growth in the amount and complexity of the data output from
these ever-more-representative and detailed simulations of reality. As a
consequence, obtaining an adequate understanding of these results has
become ever more difficult.
One of the tools available to the
supercomputer user to help bridge this gap is that of visualization--in
particular, visualization that is tightly coupled to the computational
problem. This tutorial examined many of the issues involved with
effective visualization of supercomputer-sized data sets, including data
management, existing and future toolsets, and solutions based on
hardware, software, and/or combined approaches.
Also discussed was the
large discrepancy in time scales between the various problems
components--e.g., a wall clock time acceptable for a large simulation is often
unacceptable for an interactive visualization. As data sets rapidly
approach levels where they can no longer be effectively stored, this will
continue as an ever more frequently occurring problem.
The tutorial was split into four sections:
- Definitions and history
- Products, tools, and vendors
- Delivering the goods
- The challenges
The first section served to provide a background in the
terminology and sense of the fields origins. The second covered a wide
variety of the applications that have been developed over the years and
the customer needs that they were designed to fill.
In the third section,
issues such as networking and data locality were discussed as well as
their effects on those techniques utilizing distributed and remote
visualization. Included in this was the impact of the World Wide Web and
how these technologies will interact and influence each other.
The forth
section, on "challenges," talked about the changing role of
supercomputing in the future as well as the differing demands this new
role will place on the analysis of supercomputing data and the methods by
which users will gain insight into the problems to which these large
simulations applied.
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