This article has but scratched the surface of a number of serious challenges facing modern scientific researchers. At the root of most of these challenges is the fact that we are awash with information, and that gaining understanding from an increasing amount of data is an incredibly challenging task with few, if any, “off-the-shelf” solutions. This article has provided an overview of the value of visualization in scientific knowledge discovery, as well as a couple of examples of current state-of-the-art.
The mission of DOE’s SciDAC Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies is to gain traction on solutions to this large family of difficult challenges. We use a multi-faceted approach where state-of-the-art technologies from visualization, data analysis, data management, visual interfaces, software architecture and engineering are brought to bear on some of the world’s most challenging scientific data understanding problems.
For more information about VACET, please visit our website at www.vacet.org.
This work was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 as part of the DOE Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program.
2 Garth, C., Gerhardt, F., Tricoche, X., Hagen, H. “Efficient Computation and Visualization of Coherent Structures in Fluid Flow Applications,” Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics/IEEE Visualization, 2007 (accepted for publication).
3 U.S. Department of Energy, “Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing”- www.scidac.gov/SciDAC.pdf , March 2000.
4 Mount, R. (ed), The Office of Science Data-Management Challenge – Report from the DOE Office of Science Data-Management Workshops, www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/getdoc/slac-r-782.pdf , May 2004.
5 Varian, H. “The Information Economy,” Scientific American, pp 200-201, September 1995.
6 Bajaj, C., Pascucci, V., Schikore, D. “Fast Isocontouring for Improved Interactivity,” in Proceedings of the 1996 Symposium on Volume Visualization, pp 39-46, October 1996.
7 Bowman, I., Shalf, J., Ma, K.-L., Bethel, E. W. “Performance Modeling for 3D Visualization in a Heterogeneous Computing Environment,” Technical Report LBNL-56977. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley CA, 2004.
8 Stockinger, K., Shalf, J., Wu, K., Bethel, E. W. “Query-Driven Visualization of Large Data Sets.” in Proceedings of IEEE Visualization 2005, pp 167-174, Minneapolis NM, October 2005.
9 Gyulassy, A., Natarajan, V., Hamann, B., Pascucci, V. “Efficient Computation of Morse-Smale Complexes for Three-Dimensional Scalar Functions,” Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics/IEEE Visualization, 2007 (accepted for publication).
10 Stasko, J., Zhang, E. “Focus+Context Display and Navigation Techniques for Enhancing Radial, Space-Filling Hierarchy,” in Proceedings of IEEE Information Visualization 2000, pp57-65, Salt Lake City UT, October 2000.
11 Lee, W., Ethier, S., Wang, W., Klasky, S. “Gyrokinetic Particle Simulation of Fusion Plasmas: Path to Petascale Computing,” Journal of Physics: Conference Series 46(2006), pp 73-81, Proceedings of SciDAC 2006. Institute of Physics Publishing, July 2006.
12 Rübel, O., Weber, G. H., Keränen, S. V. E., Fowlkes, C. C., Hendriks, C. L., Simirenko, L., Shah, N., Eisen, M., Biggin, M., Hagen, H., Sudar, J., Malik, J., Knowles, D., Hamann, B. “PointCloudXplore: Visual Analysis of 3D Gene Expression Data Using Physical Views and Parallel Coordinates,” in Data Visualization 2006, Proceedings of EuroVis 2006, pp203-210, Eurographics Association, Aire-la-Ville Switzerland, July 2006.
13 Bellman, R. Adaptive Control Processes: A Guided Tour. Princeton University Press, 1961.
14 K. Wu, E. Otoo, and A. Shoshani. “On the Performance of Bitmap Indices for High Cardinality Attributes,” in International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Toronto, Canada. September 2004.
15 Wu, K., Zhang, W.-M., Perevoztchikov, V., Laurent, J., Shoshani, A. “The Grid Collector: Using an Event Catalog To Speed Up User Analysis in a Distributed Environment,” Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP), Interlaken, Switzerland, September 2004.
16 Stockinger, K., Bethel, E. W., Campbell, S., Dart, E., Wu, K. “Detecting Distributed Scans Using High Performance Query-Driven Visualization,” in Proceedings of SC06 (Supercomputing).
17 Weber, G. H., Beckner, V., Childs, H., Ligocki, T., Miller, M., van Straalen, B., Bethel. E. W., "Visualization Tools for Adaptive Mesh Refinement Data," in Proceedings of the 4th High End Visualization Workshop (Tyrol Austria, June 18-22, 2007), pp. 12-25, 2007.
18 VisIt Visualization Software - www.llnl.gov/visit , September 2007.