HPCS 2013 - Visualization everywhere???

Visualization was pretty prominent at HPCS in general this year. I think we all know the only way to make sense out of complex data, in particular "big data", is to use visualization in some form. Almost all speakers at the conference talked about visualization on one form or another...

I took the WestGrid Visualization Roadshow on tour to HPCS 2013 this week. Held a day long workshop on Monday, teaching introductory Paraview. Good attendance and lots of interest...

Also chaired a Visualization BOF on Tuesday. Again, pretty good turnout, with most of the interest around how to support visualization effectively. The problem at most Compute Canada sites is that there is no dedicated support person for visualization. Visualization support, like any support, takes time - and most analysts support visualization off the side of their desk.  Not sure how to change that without money, people, and commitment from above...

I also did a couple of ad-hoc remote visualization demonstrations at HPCS as well - people were interested in seeing how well it worked. Nothing like a demo without planning, but it all worked. Connected the GPU nodes on parallel.westgrid.ca to my laptop, via wireless, in Ottawa. Remote visualization worked very well - I think we might have some remote visualization users from the East on parallel soon 8-)

HPCS 2013 - Ottawa

Attending the HPCS 2013 conference in Ottawa, lots of interesting talks with a focus on the importance of big data in science and the community. One of the most interesting was from the CIO from the City of Chicago, talking about their open data initiative. Check out this map to see an example of their open data interface (Crime Data from 2012). Very impressive.

Other very interesting talks on the computation and data in weather predicition, high energy physics, astronomy, brain imaging, and next generation genomics. Interesting thing is that although these research projects are "data intensive" in many of them the data is prediceted to grow significantly in the future. Look out when the Square Kilometer Array comes on line!!!

Check out the HPCS 2013 program for details...

Cyberinfrastructure services for the long tail of science BOF

A BOF to discuss infrastructure for Small to Medium Sized Labs (SMLs), the equivalent of the SME in the business world. Ian Foster cites [???] stating that 80% of NSF funding is given through grants of < $350K. SMLs struggle to meet their IT needs. The big question, how can cyberinfrastructure meet the needs of this research community.

Jim Myers - RPI talks about the SEAD CI infrastructure project in the support of sustainability research. Looks quite interesting in terms of managing data in a Flickr/social network style interface... Surprise, surprise, people like it when the tools are easy to use and not draconian...

Carl Kesselman - USC talks about the data life cycle and mechanisms for sharing data. Suggests that long tail research data is often VERY messy and ad hoc with meta-data encoded in odd ways (file path). Manage data through tagging data files, allowing searches to find data of interest... User's publish data files and subscribe to data files of interest. Back end is a DropBox style capability.

Ian Foster - ANL talks about Globus Online as a resource for managing data.

Great discussion after the speakers finished presenting... A huge need and lots of interesting opportunities!!! Institute for Enabling Long Tail Research web site at https://sites.google.com/site/ieltrconcept/home

Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) BOF - Catching Up!!!

Attended the SAGE BOF and caught up with EVL/GLVF colleagues... As usual, SAGE users/reserarchers are doing interesting and exciting things... A couple of interesting observations:

• SAGE usage continues to grow (~25% per year over the last four years).
• Interesting CAVE-2 system - Large surround screen LCD tiled display. Combining features of tiled display wall world of SAGE with the immersive 3D world of a VR system.
• Heard about CAL-VR a couple times at the conference (Kaust immersive display, also in the EVL CAVE-2 system). Might be worth looking at for the IQStation.
• SAGE-NEXT is a SAGE system for a single computer that drives a large tiled display wall (8K x 2K). Sometimes has trouble pushing the pixels but is much simpler than the typical cluster based system.
• GenoSAGE - a visualization system for genome visualization. Sound interesting, need to follow up with Luc to see what kind of tools they are using.

Ultrascale Vis Workshop - Towards Exascale

Ken Moreland from Sandia National Lab presents an interesting talk about the challenges of visualization in the exascale world. Really, a talk about the challenges of exascale in general, using visualization as a case study in how we might tackle exascale. Too much concurrency (too many processors/cores/threads), and therefore too much overhead, on all levels... Libraries from National Labs (DAX, PISTON) are moving towards tackling these problems...

On the road again... SC 2012 in Salt Lake City

Annual adventure to SC, in Salt Lake City this year, is underway. Salt Lake City is a winter wonderland on arrival. No impact for my flight, but others had issues...

SC2011 - Seattle

Annual pilgrimage to SC currently underway. This year a large presence for WestGrid in the Compute Canada booth, with an IQStation running 3D demos for the week. Spend the first three days setting up the hardware and software with WestGrid colleagues... A bit of a job, but demo was ready to go for the Gala Opening last night. Had lots of interest at the Gala opening with many people interested in the demos...

GPU Ray Tracing - nVidia tech talk

GPU ray tracing is available as a main stream tool. Five years ago considered "the future" but impossible on GPU (challenge/claim made to GPU community). NVidia solution is Optix, a library API for abstracting the RT core from the hardware. There are a bunch of commercial apps for RT on GPU but Optix as an API for developers looks interesting. Beta of new version available soon.

Lunch with the Aussies

Heard from Kevin Smith and Matt Adcock from my ANU/Australia days. They are also in town for SIGGRAPH and we went to lunch. Talked about old times, caught up with what the Canberra (ANU/CSIRO) gang is up to. Also talked a lot about my PhD research, turns out Matt and one of his colleagues (Viveka Welley) are interested in similar areas. Not too surprising since I worked so closely with them in the "ol' days".

Cory Doctorow on DRM

Great talk from Cory Doctorow on the evils of DRM. I suspect it will be up on YouTube soon. Cory explicitly gave open license to record his talk, despite the fact that SIGGRAPH has recording restrictions. An interesting community for such a talk.

SIGGRAPH papers fast forward

Fast forward summarizes all the SIGGRAPH papers with each presenter given one minute to describe their work. I think the speakers spent as much time on their fast forward talks as their paper. Pretty entertaining and lots of great looking talks.

Hot3D panel at HPG 2011

Interesting panel at the end of HPG 2011. David Luebke (nVidia), Mike Houston and Mike Mantor (AMD), and William Mark (Intel) talked about futures of graphics hardware. Interesting that all speakers talked about the impact of other forces that are driving GPU development (mobile computing/power/sales volumes, getting the GPU closer to the CPU). This, combined with other comments during the conference (did you know that the PS3 gpu is five years old and isn't going to be updated for another couple of years) and the influence of HPC on GPUs makes you wonder if high performance graphics will be the driver of GPU development in the future.

High Performance Graphics (HPG) 2011

Back in conference mode so better update the blog. Spent the last couple days at HPG 2011, a conference that is running in parallel to SIGGRAPH 2011. Brings back memories of early to mid nineties when I was working in this area. Back to my teapot days as my brother would say. Pretty interesting to see what is going on. In some ways the same stuff (voxels, bounding volume hierarchies, and frames per second) and in some ways very different (20 ms per frame, and coaxing flops from GPUs). Lots of interesting papers!!!

Bonus was that I got to meet with a couple of old colleagues, including Eric Haines (from my Ray Tracing News days circa 1992) and Mark Bolstad (from IEEE Vis circa 1993).

SAGE - Pushing the Envelope, like usual!

The SAGE BOF was interesting. EVL and the SAGE group pushing the boundaries like usual! Nice work Jason, Luc, Maxine, Sungwon, and Ratko (and the rest of the SAGE community).

Some very impressive streaming results from SARA and some interesting work with CalIT2, CINEGrid, and Disney. Nice integration with ParaView and SAGE to stream parallel ParaView session to SAGE wall. Also, nice discussion of user interface issues in designing for wall based use cases.

Factors:

• Thin bezels important to usability.
  
• Reachable for interaction.
• Visiblity for large audiences.
• Mobility
  
• Touch screens - good for detail, localized interaction, tiring for longer work.
• Gyromouse - standing but no need to walk back and forth
• Comfort - use of laptops, sitting around, interacting with desktops
• Video conferencing
• Mapping content between remote sites
  
• Touch screen interface over very large tiled display - VERY nice!
• Argonne and nVidia booth on demo
  

Definitely worth going to the booths for Kaust (Booth 2247), SARA, Argonne (Booth 2513) and others to see the SAGE demos.

Whats Next? SAGENext - Single node SAGE portals makes it usable to MANY users! Enabling cloud applications such as Google Services (like anything cloud, I am not quite sure what this means 8-)... Coming to you for SC 2011!

What's in a name - Ultrascale Visualization

The 5th Ultrascale visualization workshop at SC 2010 is focused on visualization at the exascale. What a great name - Ultrascale Visualization is always current - visualization of data at the largest scale and never requiring a name change. The key question: How do you deal with exascale computation when it is too expensive (in terms of time and power) to move the raw data off of the machine. Is in-situ visualization the way of the future?

Jazz on Bourbon Street

I suppose one can't spend time in New Orleans without mentioning the great Jazz and crazy atmosphere on Bourbon Street. Arrived late Saturday night but managed to find a great live band, playing for free in a small plaza just off Bourbon Street. Great tunes!

Paraview Coporcessing Library

Paraview now has a co-processing library, designed to allow computational codes to perform "in-situ" visualization "easily". I didn't sit through this tutorial in it entirety, but it looks like an interesting capability for those that want to visualize without writing data to disk and/or transferring data to a local visualization machine.

Still requires the author of the computational code to transform data to VTK objects, but given the fact that data sets are becoming larger we may see this more and more.

CUDA Tutorial

CUDA Programming + Optimization - my head hurts!!!

Blog is back - SC 2010 in New Orleans

I'm backkkkk... This time at SC 2010 in New Orleans.

First things first, here is a list of the activities that I think are interesting at SC this year. Of course none of this includes stuff on the exhibition floor. Not sure how I will fit it all in!

Al Gore - Speaking at SC09

Vice President Al Gore is speaking at SC this morning. Got here early to make sure I got a seat - lots of seats left at the moment, but its going to fill up fast I suspect...