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As computational capabilities continue to track Moore's Law and the scientific community continues to progress in harnessing the power of parallel systems, the volume of the resulting datastream will continue to escalate. This is particularly true in earth system simulation. Current FY1999 efforts in coupled earth-ocean systems, global circulation, turbulence, and convection already produce datasets ranging in size from 250 GB up to 10 terabytes (TB). Managing and effectively analyzing datasets of such volume is a growing problem and will constitute one of the primary barriers to scientific progress as we enter the next millenium.Already there are indications that portions of large simulations are not analyzed as completely as desired, due largely to the diminishing rewards available from inadequate analysis tools. In the visualization community, there is a growing sense that simulations are producing complex datasets at a much greater pace than current software and hardware technologies and methodologies can support. And there are many who believe that future terascale computational thrusts will result in datasets of such volume and complexity that the computational and software resources required to understand the data will be comparable to those of the simulation.
Visual computing plays an increasingly vital role in enabling understanding and knowledge-sharing of earth system research results. The ability to explore and understand complex simulated and observed worlds will be of great importance not just to earth system science, but to all science. It will be vital to the researcher and formative to school children learning about physics or chemistry. Scientists will explore the world in ways they never could before; children will learn in ways we didn't imagine just a few years ago.
The Visualization Lab is aimed at helping to usher in this new era of visual computing by enabling the researcher to freely explore vast dataspaces and communicate the results to a wide and diverse audience. It is a synthesis of people, computers, tools, and techniques aimed at a simple goal: to advance atmospheric science by direct application of state-of-the-art visualization.
The idea is to serve as a catalyst in the service of science, bringing useful new technologies to bear on valid problems -- then turning that technology back into something usable. Scientific relevance is a primary metric of success. Communication of end results to the scientific community and general public is a priority. We target our goals with talented and enthusiastic staff, advanced technology, facilities, and thrust areas described below.
Facilities
Mesa Visualization Lab
The Mesa Visualization Lab is a cutting-edge facility that supports research, development, production, outreach, and scientific study and review in all areas of earth system visualization. The lab complex includes an 8-processor SGI Onyx2 Infinite Reality2 visual supercomputer, a 4-processor SGI Challenge server, an SGI Octane/MXE (for mobile use), and a variety of office systems. The Onyx2 was upgraded with 384 GB of Ciprico Fibre Channel RAID which enables the visualization of much larger datasets at a much higher level of performance.
To address maintainability, lab networking was migrated from ATM/OC-3 to 100BTX Ethernet and in parallel work began to evaluate Gigabit Ethernet as our new networking infrastructure. All Visualization Lab systems were upgraded to IRIX 6.5.1 and brought into Y2K compliance with the rest of SCD's computational assets. In addition, a new digital video animation system based on an Accom 2/Xtreme was installed and integrated into the lab environment. The new system enables the production of excellent studio-quality video with a performance boost of 15x over the previous generation of technology, along with superb realtime video digitizing capability. The latter was used over the course of the year to ingest quite a variety of extant video clips and productions for programs across UCAR.
Work began in FY1999 to define the next generation of the Visualization Lab. The new facility will be a sophisticated, world-class asset that focuses the most powerful visual computing technologies on knowledge generation and communication for Earth System research. It will combine the attributes of a visual supercomputing facility, a situation room, a boardroom, a state-of-the-art collaborative environment, and a theater with each modality targeted at a different audience/group. Attributes of the new lab will include space for larger groups, new projection systems, immersive collaborative components, enhanced visual supercomputing resources, Gigabit Ethernet networking, and a consolidated storage architecture. Construction is slated to begin mid-FY2000.
PC-based graphics performance is advancing even faster than that prescribed for processors by Moore's Law. With performance doubling every 6-9 months and capability growing rapidly as well, the commodity computing platform is becoming extremely attractive and viable for high-end visualization work. Efforts began in FY1999 to develop relationships with other parties who are involved in engineering support for these advanced graphics boards in the Linux/OpenGL environment.
Given the apparent migration of our research staff to Linux, the potential here is tremendous: it may soon be the case that a significant percentage of our scientists will have visualization capability on their desktops that is on par with what we had in the lab only a year or two ago.
In a similar vein, research efforts are underway to develop the visual computing equivalent of a Beowulf cluster -- a network of PCs equipped with the latest commodity graphics cards running in parallel to deliver a single result. During FY2000 the lab will be carefully studying progress in both of these areas and will begin to bring some experimental systems into the lab for evaluation as opportunity permits.
Foothills Visualization Lab
The Foothills Visualization Lab provides a self-service animation production capability that includes modest support for exploratory visualization and digital movie creation. While the lab continues to support modest regular use, both the visualization platform and the animation recording equipment entered into an End-Of-Life phase in FY1999.HAO and SCD jointly sought funds to enhance this facility, but this was not successful. So the lab will be held in maintenance mode as long as practical relative to the availability of factory service and as long as there is significant demand for it. Decommissioning is anticipated in FY2000. Once decommissioned, it is expected that users requiring exploratory capability will use the Mesa facilities, and video production will be a completely digital affair, accomplished largely on the commodity desktop and shared via the web and presented on notebook computers.
Science
At present, we have well-developed capabilities and experience across the breadth of Earth System science. Extant visualization work encompasses climate, chemistry, ocean, mesoscale systems, forest fires, geophysical and astrophysical turbulence, clear air turbulence, tropical storms, ecosystems, and more. We have developed both interactive and production visualization environments that allow us to create and record both mono and stereo 3D visualizations of very large, very complex multivariate datasets.Our capability in this area is very effective, and during the upcoming year we will continue to grow it and produce compelling and scientifically useful visualizations from complex datasets in all of the aforementioned areas. Specific future thrust areas will include accommodating larger, more complex datasets and applying real-time volumetric visualization and flow visualization to the problems. There will also be a focus on integrating multiple spatial data sources (e.g. GIS, Landsat) with simulation as well as observational datasets.
The lab was involved in quite a number of new research projects during FY1999:
Pumping magnetic fields - Researchers at the University of Colorado are trying to better understand the origins of magnetic fields in the solar convection zone, an area of unstability near the solar surface. Numerical simulations are being used to investigate the fields that are believed to be derived from strong toriodal action in a thin layer just below the convection zone called the tachocline. Visualization Lab staff worked with the CU researchers to develop visualizations of turbulence in the ionized gas and related vorticity structures.
Typhoon Herb - Using new Alias/Wavefront-based Maya tools, the lab worked with MMM staff to develop visualizations of observed and simulated data related to Typhoon Herb. In the same visual reference frame, real-world reflectivity data were compared to their analog in the simulation results providing a side-by-side comparison of the two sources.
Forest fire on a small hill - The Visualization Lab worked with MMM researchers Terry Clark and Janice Coen to visualize a new simulation of forest fire propagation over a small hill. The visual representations showed enstrophy, temperature, and fuel consumption over the course of the simulation. This work appeared in the September 1999 issue of Computer Graphics World magazine.
CCM3 T170 - CGD researchers produced a new simulation and a unique dataset: a full year of CCM3 data at T170 resolution. New visual representations of the simulation were developed in a similar vein to the earlier and successful work with CCM2 T170 datasets. This work will be pursued further in FY2000.
Mozart - Working with MMM researchers, Visualization Lab staff produced visualizations of a MOZART simulation that focused on the relationship between lightning and the production of NOx and ozone.
Coral reefs - One of our first efforts in ecosystems, visualizations were produced of a fascinating new simulation by Kleypas (CGD) of coral reef evolution since the last ice age. The visualization depicted the ocean floor and the growth of various coral forms as sea level rose.
Historical visualization - In FY1999 the Visualization Lab began collecting historical visualization footage dating back to the early 1960s. The material was sent out to professional firms to be cleaned and carefully transferred from film to digital videotape. The videotapes were then brought back to the lab, digitized on our new Accom digital video system, and encoded in a variety of digital video formats and archived on the Mass Storage System. The resulting footage is now available for presentations and is becoming increasingly popular for talks that span the era of earth system simulation.
Visualization tools
Visualization tools are at the heart of our work, and while we use off-the-shelf solutions whenever possible, we are generally involved in some level of R&D development as well as customization of existing packages. Much of this work is of interest to our community, and we make every effort to share with them. Our primary thrust areas are described here.NCAR version of Vis5D
A local version of the popular Vis5D package, developed at the University of Wisconsin, has been developed to satisfy NCAR science and local technology thrust areas. Our development provides an effective data exploration tool that incorporates stereo/3D virtual capability, very large file support, and output of VRML and other scene description languages. This software has been made generally available to the community on the web and is widely used at other centers, universities, corporations, and in the DOD/DOE. Work began during FY1999 to integrate our functionality with the new 5.0 version of Vis5D.MAYA
Maya is a sophisticated commercial package for photorealistic animation production. It is used widely in the motion picture industry. The Maya environment has potential for enabling the production of scientific "virtual tours" of simulated phenomena. The lab began building the expertise and infrastructure required to integrate Maya into the production toolkit. Staff took training courses and software was engineered to provide linkage between our Vis5D visualization environment and the Maya ingest of geometric scene information.Volume visualization
Another local visualization technology development is the gvolsh package. gvolsh provides a high-performance and high-quality volume-visualization environment that can make effective use of parallel computational resources. It was also engineered to operate across local and wide-area networks while maintaining top-notch performance. The results of this effort have also been shared with the general community.Visual computing systems
The recent upgrades to the lab have provided a powerful 8-processor visualization platform and much of the day-to-day work is now accomplished -- better than ever -- on that system. And while it represents the mainstream environment for us, large distributed parallel systems as well as commodity PCs merit significant attention.During the year we made excellent progress in using large multiprocessor systems for high-performance volume visualization. This work will be extended and enhanced on the new 128-processor Origin system and also evaluated on commodity Wintel systems. In addition, the pairing of the two -- a large visualization server feeding imagery over the wire to desktop and portable systems -- will be demonstrated and evaluated as a potential new model for certain classes of work. This is a model that bears evaluation as a potential new class of service offered by SCD to both local and remote users. On the same front, new simulation results from the Clark/Coen forest fire model were optically ray-traced on the Origin2000 128-processor system, successfully loading the machine fully for a period of two hours.
The lab also constructed a dual-processor Pentium-II system and, in collaboration with Dynamic Pictures, equipped it with a high-end graphics accelerator capable of stereo/3D work. A new version of Vis5D was developed by visiting scientist Dr. Hongqing Wang, and the interactive performance for stereo/3D visualization on this commodity platform was very impressive and encouraging. Work will continue in the upcoming year.
Education and outreach
"The Virtual Earth System" and "The Earth System Web"
The "Virtual Earth System" is a mobile science and technology exhibit/presentation that provides visitors with an opportunity to experience a virtual 3D tour of the complex, intricate, and often beautiful structure existing in our simulated and observed scientific data. It consists of a portable projection system, a driving workstation, stereo/3D display equipment, and the physical exhibit itself. Its purpose is to enable us to present NCAR/UCAR science and visual results to a broad community at venues that offer significant exposure to our community."The Earth System Web" is a special edition of "The Virtual Earth System" and delivers a similar presentation from a web-based VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) 3D world with stereo/3D video streaming over high-bandwidth wide-area networks.
"The Virtual Earth System" made quite a number of appearances over the course of the year including SC98 in Orlando, Fl., AGU 1998 in San Francisco, AMS 1999 in Dallas, Texax, the IUGG Conference in Birmingham, U.K., and the Coalition for National Science Funding in Washington D.C. Via a special invitation, the exhibit was taken to the American Physical Society's "Century of Physics" in Atlanta Georgia, and perhaps 20 percent of the 10,000 attendees visited the exhibit with uniformly positive and enthusiastic feedback.
"The Earth System Web", a special high-tech networked version of the exhibit, was presented by invitation at SC1998 for the Next Generation Internet exhibit. The lab also helped construct a multi-media presentation for a DOE presentation for the I2 Program on behalf of our researchers who are funded by DOE. On the educational front, the lab hosted a Project Learn session where the attendees were able to create their own visualizations of various scientific simulation results, and feedback was very positive. All of this was in addition to many, many demonstrations and presentations made in the Visualization Lab locally.
Our visual supercomputing environment has allowed us to produce 3D/stereo movies of many sorts of fascinating simulated phenomena, much of which is as accessible by school children as it is by scientists. And, while we bring many people through our lab for visits and presentations, we can only scratch the surface of the potential audience. In the future, we plan to make arrangements such that classes and visiting groups are able to experience a Visualization Lab presentation.
Technical seminars and presentations
Visualization lab staff were visible in the community as well. Activities included chairing the Visualization Program for the Cray User's Group Meeting, a presentation at the NSF/DOE Large Dataset Visualization and Management Workshop, and a well-received keynote address for the Colorado Computational Science Fair.Scientific and Technical Presentations: 32 (includes technical vislab presentations).
Nontechnical Presentations: 3 (includes educational vislab presentations e.g. Project Learn, students, etc.).
Publications
Clyne, J.C., Dennis, J.; "Interactive Direct Volume Rendering of Time-Varying Data" ; Accepted for the IEEE Visualization Symposium, Austria, May, 1999.Clark, T.L., Radke, L, Coen, J., Middleton, D.; "Analysis of Small-scale Dynamics in a Crown Fire Using Infrared Video Camera Imagery"; Accepted for publication by the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, January 1999.
Middleton, D., Clark, T.L., Coen, J.; "Forest Fire on a Small Hill"; Computer Graphics World - Insights, September, 1999.
Visitors and collaborators
Dr. Kendal McGuffie, Australian Bureau of Meteorology: Visualization of a simulation of cyclone landfall.Dr. Hongqing Wang, University of Peking, Severe Storms Research Institute: Development of visualization technology for the PC.
Michael Boettinger and Joachim Biercamp, DKRZ: Climate visualization.
Yuri Artemov, CUNY, Physics Ph.D. candidate: Visualization of turbulence in superconductors.
Collaborative work
MAGIC-II - The Visualization Lab continued to collaborate with this DARPA-sponsored effort, but activities ceased during FY1999 as the project ended its funded phase.CCLI/VirtualExploratorium - During FY1999, funding was awarded to NSF for this effort to build a new generation of undergraduate learning environments which incorporate advanced visualization and media features. It is a collaborative effort between UCAR/PAGE, NCAR/SCD/Visualization, the University of Illinois, and the University of Georgia.