B. Pailthorpe, J. Genetti, A. Olson, R. Charles, A. de Castro, G. Johnson and D. Nadeau
The NPACI's Scalable Visualization Toolkits (VisTools)
are a collection of software libraries for analysing and visualising
data sets that are
too large to fit in memory using out-of-core techniques.
This work was initiated by B. Pailthorpe and A. Olson, along
many
colleagues in NPACI as an alpha project "Scalable Visualization Toolkits for Brains
to Bays" by NPACI in 1999. It was funded by NSF, DOE and UCSD
and continues
at SDSC under the direction of Dr Steve Cutchin.
Astrophysics: the Orion Nebula
C.R. O'Dell and Zheng Wen of Rice University derived a 3D
model of the nebula from infrared and visible light observations from
Hubble and ground-based imagery. Using computer graphics techniques and
imagery a fly-though of the nebua was created.
A 2 1/2 minute fly-through animation of the nebula requiring about
31,000 high-resolution images, was produced for the opening of the Rose
center (Hayden Planetarium) on December 31, 1999. The planetarium uses
seven 1280x1024 video projectors to seamlessly cover the interior of
the dome.
The animation frames were rendered using the 1000+ processors IBM
RS/6000 teraflops supercomputer on the IBM factory floor. Running one
multi-threaded renderer on each 8-processor node, the frames were
computed during a single 12-hour period.
More information on the project on the NPACI Online News
Volume IV Issue 4 - February 23, 2000.
 |
| The Orion Nebula featured
in the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre in 2000.
runner-up of the NSF Visualization Contest / Science Magazine in 2003. |
Biology:
cell imaging
A cell was imaged using two techniques: Nomarski Interference
Microscopy to study the cell's structure (in grey) and fluorescence to
image the chromosomes within the cell (in green). The two datasets were
composited together to produce the image below
 |
| Cell imaged by Nomarski
Interference Microscopy and fluorescence. |
Many people worked on the Orion Nebula visualization: S. Napear, A. Snavelly, H. Ammons, J. Meyer and students at SDSC; C. Emmart, E. Wesselak, D. Davidson, N. deGrasse-Tyson, American Museum of Natural History; C. R. O'Dell, Z. Wen from Rice University.
J. R. Feramisco, J. Sherman, S. McMullen and colleagues from Moores UCSD Cancer Center provided the datasets.
Publications
D.R. Nadeau, J. Genetti, S. Napear, B A Pailthorpe, C. Emmart, E Wesselak & D Davidson, "Visualising the Orion Nebula", IEEE Visualisation (2000).
D.R. Nadeau, J. Genetti, S. Napear, B A Pailthorpe, C. Emmart, E Wesselak & D Davidson, "Visualising Stars and Emission Nebula", EuroGraphics, (2000).
B.A. Pailthorpe, N. Bordes, "Scalable volume visualisation, ranging from astrophysics, through brain mapping, to oceanography"; In "Simulation and Visualization on The Grid"; B. Ernquist, L. Johnsson, M Hammill & F. Short (Eds.); Lecture Notes in Computational Science, pp122-134 (Springer-Verlag, 2000).