John Sloan (NCAR) and Reagan Moore (SDSC) perform a live demo on the ImmersaDesk at Supercomputing '95.
The MetaCenter research booth at Supercomputing '95 exhibit featured projects in interdisciplinary research, computer and computational science research, Grand Challenge projects, and National Challenge projects. A special feature of the MetaCenter booth was the ImmersaDesk, a portable, semi-immersive virtual reality system similar to a big-screen television.John Sloan, head of SCD's High-Performance Systems Section, hosted the NCAR portion of the MetaCenter booth. He gave ongoing ImmersaDesk demos of the Visible Human Project (VHP) and the Distributed Climate System Model (DCSM).
"Both the VHP and the DCSM I-Desk demos were extremely popular," Sloan says. "There were a constant stream of folks at both demos, and an equally impressive stream of interested people at the MetaCenter booth. Most of the folks were primarily interested in the VHP, but some had specific backgrounds in climate modeling and were quite interested in projects such as NCAR's Climate Simulation Lab, the Distributed Climate Simulation Lab, and the CO-OP 3D Project."
"The Visible Human Project was an interactive demo that ran on a local Silicon Graphics Onyx workstation." Sloan explains. "The demo included a data set that allowed viewers to see a portion of the Visible Male's leg. Thanks to the I-Desk virtual-reality tracking system, viewers could push their heads through the skin and examine the knee joint underneath. Another part of the demo was a demonstration of virtual surgery in which the operator cut the skin of the leg and viewers could push their heads into the surgical cut to examine the muscle tissue in the incision."
The DCSM demo consisted of an atmospheric model running on a CRAY J916 at NCAR and an ocean model running on the CRAY C90 at the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC). The models were coupled with the NCAR flux coupler and exchanged boundary conditions over the National Science Foundation's very-high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS). Output was routed through HERMES, a software system developed by SDSC, to an SDSC-developed visualization client running on the local SGI Onyx graphics server.Any three data sets from the atmospheric model, ocean model, and flux coupler could be dynamically selected and displayed simultaneously on three quadrants of the ImmsersaDesk. The fourth quadrant was reserved to display either the CPU time needed to advance a simulation day or the bandwidth being achieved over the vBNS.
The National Science Foundation MetaCenter consists of NCAR, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the Cornell Theory Center, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The centers collaborate through the MetaCenter to advance capabilities in computational science beyond what each center can achieve alone.