Visualization Lab
Into an era of Visual Computing
We are entering a revolutionary period. The confluence of harnessed
commodity computational power, capacious storage, display technologies,
and high-bandwidth networks coupled with
The Second Web
constitutes the critical mass for the next generation of computing:
an era of Visual Computing. The term embodies basic concepts that
are largely not addressed in our current environments: we are visual creatures,
we interact visually, we absorb information best visually, and we need
to interact with our machines in a visual mode.
The ability to explore and understand complex simulated and observed
worlds will be of great importance not just to atmospheric 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 their
world in ways they never could before; children will learn in ways we didn't
imagine just a few years ago.
Our simulations and our observational datasets grow larger and more
complex by the day. And, as our computational capabilities continue to
track the exponential curve, it may soon be the case that the primary limiting
factor for research is not the technology, but the human. One must be able
to digest the data, ask questions of it. There are many questions we can
ask of these complex simulations -- many questions that in the past made
no sense to ask or had no answer that could be easily conveyed. The
Visualization Lab is aimed at helping to usher in this new era of visual
interaction -- at providing the ability to freely explore vast dataspaces
-- and produce materials that can communicate the results of such efforts
to peers and public.
Purpose of the
Visualization Lab
The
Visualization Lab 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. During FY1998, the Visualization Lab
was upgraded in several important areas. Most importantly, the 4-year-old
flagship visual supercomputer was replaced by an 8-processor R10000 Silicon
Graphics Onyx-2 Infinite Reality Engine with at least 2GB of physical memory.
A mid-range Octane system was acquired to leverage the flagship system
by providing additional seamless capacity while also serving as a
portable demonstration system for remote venues. Such advanced systems
require advanced networks and accordingly, work began on testing a lab/office
workgroup net engineered to optimize producitivity on the systems while
minimizing unnecessary impact on the UCAR backbone. This combination
of powerful systems and networking has enabled forays into new and
more difficult scientific and technical domains.
Foothills Visualization Lab
The Foothills Visualization Lab provides a self-service animation production
capability that includes some modest support for exploratory visualization
and digital movie creation. While the lab continues to have regular
use, both the visualization platform and the animation recording equipment
used will enter into an EOL 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 FY1999. 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.
Visualization Theater and "The Earth
System Web"
The Visualization Theater is the mobile arm of the Visualization
Lab. It provides viewers with a 3D visual experience 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,
and a collection of stereo display equipment. The Theater's purpose is
to enable us to present the fruits of our visualization work and NCAR/UCAR
science to a broad audience without having to move a huge visual supercomputer
all over the country. It serves as a major component of SCD's traveling
Research Exhibit and also serves as an advanced technology demonstration
platform for focused venues.
Early in the year, a dedicated stereo projection system was acquired
for the Visualization Theater along with a portable mid-range workstation
for driving it. The Theater made numerous appearances as desribed below in
Outreach. And, as
part of an overall strategic thrust area for the lab, the theater will
evolve beyond a stereo/3D theater into a fully networked cutting-edge
virtual web portal into science.
Science
At present, we have well-developed capabilities and experience across the
breadth of NCAR science. Extant
visualization work
encompasses climate, chemistry, ocean, mesoscale systems, forest fires,
geophysical and astrophysical turbulence, clear air turbulence, tropical
storms, 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 meaningful,
compelling 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 upon integrating multiple spatial data sources (e.g.
GIS, Landsat) with simulation as well as observational datasets.
The lab has been involved with quite a number of scientific research
projects. Each of the entries below provides a link to our website's
Research Gallery, where descriptions of the various projects along with
imagery and animation are published.
Polar vortex
Clear air turbulence
The Visualization Lab worked with MMM scientists Terry Clark, Bill Hall,
and Bob Kerr to better understand an exciting new simulation of Clear
Air Turbulence. The Clark model was initialized with local conditions
based on the weather associated with a 1992 incident wherein a DC-8
cargo plane flying west from Denver encountered severe turbulence and
subsequently lost one engine and 19 feet of wing. Observational LIDAR
data showed horizontally aligned vortex tubes in the region. The
visualization work focused on producing representations of turbulence
downbursts and enstrophy structures of interest to the researchers. At
an innermost grid resolution of 240x240x72, single-study file sizes were
pared to 12 GB, representing the most demanding problem the lab has yet
explored interactively with a group of researchers. The recent upgrades
to the lab's visual supercomputer, now a Silicon Graphics Onyx-2, greatly
facilitated this research work.
This ambitious new research has led to the discovery of a new form of
turbulence, and the visualization work was presented at the Developments
in Geophysical Turbulence 98 conference. For more details, imagery, and
animations, visit the Visualization Lab's
Clear Air Turbulence website.
Visualization tools
Visualization tools are at the heart of our work, and while we try to deploy
off-the-shelf solutions, 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 our colleagues. Our primary thrust areas are as described below.
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
reached a sufficiently stable state this year such that it could be easily
shared with other organizations, and a
website was
established to accomplish this. Several supercomputing centers, universities,
corporations, and the Department of Defense are using the software, and
all are reporting success. Future plans include sharing of new VRML
capabilities, the development of output interoperable with the professional
Wavefront/Maya animation software, and the prototype development of advanced,
high-performance particle animation geared for large-scale atmospheric
simulation.
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.
The Second Web
The web everyone knows today is largely a 2D place: text, images, video,
audio, and even streaming movies. The Second Web is a term used
to refer to a new 3D world where the information voyager interacts with
3D worlds that move, react, and even talk. VRML, JAVA3D, and spatialized
audio are rapidly advancing technologies that underpin the new information
paradigm. 100-Mb Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, the vBNS, Internet2, and
Digital Subscriber Lines will provide the bandwidth substrate needed to
connect everything, from research organizations to homes.
The Second Web offers tremendous promise for science, publishing, teaching,
training, and knowledge sharing. One of the Visualization Lab's primary
goals from now until the end of the millenium and beyond is to help usher
in this 3D web. Next year we will demonstrate all of our
Visualization Theater content as
3D stereo movies integrated with dynamic VRML/JAVA3D worlds with communication
taking place over the vBNS and other high-bandwidth networks. The first
incarnation of this is our Earth System Web demonstration, which showed
at several venues as desribed below in
Outreach.
Today, a person clicks their mouse on a picture and tiny little movie is
played back on their screen. We will show people navigating through a 3D
virtual world to a place where they click on a vortex tube and then
experience a virtual 3D movie from a Clear Air Turbulence Simulation. We
will show interactive visual exploration of vast dataspaces over the wire.
Computers, both great and
small
The aforementioned 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.
Animation Systems
The production of animation and movies from science has always been a core
capability supported by the lab, and it's traditionally been accomplished
with dedicated workstations and analog video tape. Digital video, the web,
and powerful video-capable notebook systems have brought within reach a
new paradigm for animation production. Thus, we focused upon developing
the new digital capabilities while also upgrading our more traditional
(and professional broadcast-compatible) animation capabilities.
A new digital disk recorder was acquired to replace a failed
optical disk recorder. This unit was integrated into the lab
environment, providing ten minutes of top-quality digital animation
capability. On the digital front, we established a solid MPEG-2
production capability, evaluated DVD (Digital Versatile Disk,
the 5" successor to CD), and continued to create MPEG-1 and AVI animations
from our visualization work. Both our digital and analog efforts have
been incorporated into high-profile UCAR and NCAR presentations and widely
used to share results with other scientists, the media, the NSF, and the
general public.
Education, Outreach,
and Technology Transfer
Our
Visualization Theater and the new
Earth System Web were shown at many prominent venues this year, exposing
NCAR science and technology to quite a large audience. The Theater will
evolve over time into something that not only delivers virtual simulation
experiences of our science to large audiences, but also eventually provides
audience interaction and exploration.
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. We are in the process
of seeking funding to develop a special version of the Visualization Theater
that can be incorporated into the Mesa Lab Science Exploratorium and possibly
be deployed at museums and other venues as well. This could open a window
into the scientific world of NCAR that all of our visitors can experience,
and if successful, may proceed outside the walls of NCAR and beyond.
Many, many demonstrations and presentations to many people were provided
over the year, but the venues described below were the most prominent public
ones.
AMS98
The Visualization Theater was shown for the second consecutive year at
the annual AMS conference in Phoenix, Arizona, to good effect. In addition,
the lab also participated in the conference's Electronic Theater, providing
a "digital IMAX" presentation to an audience of 500 or so enthusiastic
attendees. This was supplemented by one presentation on our
developments in Vis5D.
The Next-Generation
Internet
The Next-Generation Internet is the high-bandwidth network that connects a
host of government agencies, including the NSF's vBNS. In March 1998, the
Visualization Lab was invited to represent the NSF in the NGI demonstrations
at the Highway2 facility on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Our demonstration
was entitled "The Earth System Web", and it took viewers on
a virtual tour of the Earth System using an amalgam of advanced visualization
and web technology operating over the vBNS. Based on commodity web
technologies and our own locally developed stereo/3D animation tools,
the Earth System Web delivers web-navigable virtual worlds intertwined
with stereo/3D movies, all of it operating over wide-area networks.
It is perhaps a glimpse into the future of scientific presentation,
knowledge sharing, and the classroom of the future. The exhibit was
viewed by quite a number of visitors, and it received many positive
comments. This effort was funded by the NSF.
Internet2
The Internet2 is the high-bandwidth consortium of the academic community,
and UCAR is a member. As a result of our involvement with the NGI event
described above, we were invited to show our research and scientific work
once again at an almost identical Internet2 venue in April at the same
location. Results again were all positive and good exposure for the
organization.
Summit of the Americas
A representative from the International Development Bank noticed our NGI
demonstration in Washington and subsequently contacted Cisco Systems, the
premiere network supplier, who in turn contacted us and invited us to join
them in demonstrating at the technology exhibition that accompanied the
Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile in April. This event was also
a big success, and our exhibit was probably the best of the show and was
visited by quite a number of political folk. In particular, we provided
a 15-minute presentation to Secretary Daley of the Department of
Commerce. This presentation happened to focus on our Clear Air Turbulence
work, a joint effort with NOAA (under the DOC).
El Niño
The widespread interest in this year's El Niño and La Niña prompted
us to develop some high-quality animations of the observed data. These were
shown on World News Tonight presented by Peter Jennings, and still-image
results from the same effort were also featured in a Time Magazine article
on El Niño.
There was unprecedented public and scientific interest in El Niño and
La Niña this year. In response to this, and to support the local La
Niña summit, the Visualization Lab developed some compelling high-quality
animations of the observed data. These were very well received and used
to support Press Releases on the La Niña summit event. Shortly
thereafter, these visuals were also used by Peter Jennings on World News
Tonight to support a story on El Niño, and they appeared once again as a
prominent feature in a Time Magazine article. A collection of still
images and animations appears at the Visualization Lab's
El Niño and
La Niña website.
SCD hosted the MAGIC-II Winter Meeting, 1/22/98-1/23/98, DOE sponsorship
for attendees travel.
The Visualization Lab provided a Visualization session for the Developments
in Geophysical Turbulence 98 conference at NCAR. Unknown sponsorship (see
MMM ASR).
The Visualization Lab provided technical support for the Cisco Future of
Networking conference. Cisco sponsorship.
Scientific and Technical Presentations: 34 (includes technical vislab
presentations)
Nontechnical Presentations: 10 (includes educational vislab presentations
e.g. Project Learn, students, etc.)
Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics Journal article titled
"Volume Visualizing High-Resolution Turbulence Computations"
John Clyne, Tim Scheitlin, Jeffrey B. Weiss: Volume Visualizing
High-Resolution Turbulence Computations Theoret. Comput. Fluid Dynamics
11 (1998) 3/4, 195-211.
American Meteorological Society Journal of Climate (June 1998 Vol. 11
No. 6). Visualizations of CSM Surface Temps and precipitation appeared
on a supplemental CD-ROM (ISBN 1-878220-26-8) accompanying the hardcopy
journal (a special issue devoted to results from NCAR's Climate System
Model).
"ABC World News Tonight" with Peter Jennings (July 8, 1998). This
broadcast contained an SST anomaly visualization created by Tim
Scheitlin, and it was used in a segment discussing the dissipation of
El Niño and the onset of La Niña. Don Middleton also contributed to
this visualization.
Time Magazine (July 27, 1998, pp. 52-53, Volume 152 No. 4), a
science article titled "Blowing Hot and Cold" contained SST anomaly
images created by Tim Scheitlin, and these images were used in the
artwork for this article.
- 6/5/98-9/12/98: Dr. Hongqing Wang, University of Peking, Severe Storms
Research Institute. Interest: Advanced visualization on commodity computing
platforms. Severe storms. Research on high-performance visualization and
particcle animation on high-end desktop computers. Host: Don Middleton.
- 10/13/97-10/15/97: Michael Boettinger, DKRZ. Interest: Climate
Visualization. Short visit on general atmospheric science visualization.
Host: Don Middleton.
- 5/8/98: Terry Onsager et al, NOAA. Visualization Lab technology. Host:
Don Middleton.
- 1/5/98-1/30/98: Dr. Kendal McGuffie, Australian Bureau of Meteorology:
Visualizing a simulation of cyclone landfall.
Collaborative work
- The lab entered into a Memorandum of Understanding
with the University of Rhode Island to jointly seek
funding to develop a distributed, virtual operational
Hurricane Prediction Facility. Activity on this effort
is pending the availability of funding support.
- The Visualization Lab has an ongoing collaboration with the DOE-sponsored
MAGIC-II Project in the area of high-performance, distributed spatial data
visualization. The lab's contribution is in the area of VRML technology
and simulation datasets, especially Clear Air Turbulence and regional models.
- The Visualization Lab will collaborate with UCAR to form a new public
exhibit based on the Earth System Web and our Visualization Theater.
- An informal relationship has been established with Industrial Light and
Magic and LucasFilms to explore how our scientific and visualization work
might be useful for entertainment purposes and to explore how production
film-animation techniques might apply to our own work at NCAR.
- Tentative plans exist to collaborate with the UCAR PAGE program and the
University of Illinois to incorporate our VRML technology and content into
undergraduate education under the sponsorship of the NSF.
- The lab provided substantial materials and expertise in the development
of Rick Anthes' "Weather Forecasting in the Year 2025" as well as Warren
Washington's presentation on the SSP program at the National Academy of
the Sciences.