SCI Publications
2011
D. Keyes, V. Taylor, T. Hey, S. Feldman, G. Allen, P. Colella, P. Cummings, F. Darema, J. Dongarra, T. Dunning, M. Ellisman, I. Foster, W. Gropp, C.R. Johnson, C. Kamath, R. Madduri, M. Mascagni, S.G. Parker, P. Raghavan, A. Trefethen, S. Valcourt, A. Patra, F. Choudhury, C. Cooper, P. McCartney, M. Parashar, T. Russell, B. Schneider, J. Schopf, N. Sharp.
“Advisory Committee for CyberInfrastructure Task Force on Software for Science and Engineering,” Note: NSF Report, 2011.
The Software for Science and Engineering (SSE) Task Force commenced in June 2009 with a charge that consisted of the following three elements:
Identify specific needs and opportunities across the spectrum of scientific software infrastructure. Characterize the specific needs and analyze technical gaps and opportunities for NSF to meet those needs through individual and systemic approaches. Design responsive approaches. Develop initiatives and programs led (or co-led) by NSF to grow, develop, and sustain the software infrastructure needed to support NSF’s mission of transformative research and innovation leading to scientific leadership and technological competitiveness. Address issues of institutional barriers. Anticipate, analyze and address both institutional and exogenous barriers to NSF’s promotion of such an infrastructure.The SSE Task Force members participated in bi-weekly telecons to address the given charge. The telecons often included additional distinguished members of the scientific community beyond the task force membership engaged in software issues, as well as personnel from federal agencies outside of NSF who manage software programs. It was quickly acknowledged that a number of reports loosely and tightly related to SSE existed and should be leveraged. By September 2009, the task formed had formed three subcommittees focused on the following topics: (1) compute-intensive science, (2) data-intensive science, and (3) software evolution.
2010
A.N.M. Imroz Choudhury, M.D. Steffen, J.E. Guilkey, S.G. Parker.
“Enhanced Understanding of Particle Simulations Through Deformation-Based Visualization,” In Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol. 63, No. 2, pp. 117--136. 2010.
J. Luitjens, J. Guilkey, T. Harman, B. Worthen, S.G. Parker.
“Adaptive Computations in the Uintah Framework,” In Advanced Computational Infastructures for Parallel/Distributed Adapative Applications, Ch. 1, Wiley Press, 2010.
V. Pegoraro, M. Schott, S.G. Parker.
“A Closed-Form Solution to Single Scattering for General Phase Functions and Light Distributions,” In Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 29, No. 4, Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1365--1374. Aug, 2010.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8659.2010.01732.x
2009
A.N.M. Imroz Choudhury, S.G. Parker.
“Ray Tracing NPR-Style Feature Lines,” In Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering (NPAR) 2009, pp. 5--14. 2009.
S.G. Parker, K. Damevski, A. Khan, A. Swaminathan, C.R. Johnson.
“The SCIJump Framework for Parallel and Distributed Scientific Computing,” In Advanced Computational Infrastructures for Parallel and Distributed Adaptive Applications, Edited by Manish Parashar and Xiaolin Li and Sumir Chandra, Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 149--170. 2009.
DOI: 10.1002/9780470558027.ch9
V. Pegoraro, S.G. Parker.
“An Analytical Solution to Single Scattering in Homogeneous Participating Media,” In Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of the 30th Eurographics Conference), Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 329--335. 2009.
V. Pegoraro, M. Schott, S.G. Parker.
“An Analytical Approach to Single Scattering for Anisotropic Media and Light Distributions,” In Proceedings of the 35th Graphics Interface Conference, pp. 71--77. 2009.
I. Wald, W.R. Mark, J. Günther, S. Boulos, T. Ize, W. Hunt, S.G. Parker, P. Shirley.
“State of the Art in Ray Tracing Animated Scenes,” In Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 28, No. 6, pp. 1691--1722. 2009.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8659.2008.01313.x
2008
A.N.M. Imroz Choudhury, K. Potter, S.G. Parker.
“Interactive Visualization for Memory Reference Traces,” In Computer Graphics Forum, In Proceedings of EuroVis 2008, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 815--822. May, 2008.
C. Gribble, C. Brownlee, S.G. Parker.
“Practical Global Illumination for Interactive Particle Visualization,” In Computers and Graphics, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 14--24. February, 2008.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cag.2007.11.001
Particle-based simulation methods are used to model a wide range of complex phenomena and to solve time-dependent problems of various scales. Effective visualizations of the resulting state will communicate subtle changes in the three-dimensional structure, spatial organization, and qualitative trends within a simulation as it evolves. We present two algorithms targeting upcoming, highly parallel multicore desktop systems to enable interactive navigation and exploration of large particle data sets with global illumination effects. Monte Carlo path tracing and texture mapping are used to capture computationally expensive illumination effects such as soft shadows and diffuse interreflection. The first approach is based on precomputation of luminance textures and removes expensive illumination calculations from the interactive rendering pipeline. The second approach is based on dynamic luminance texture generation and decouples interactive rendering from the computation of global illumination effects. These algorithms provide visual cues that enhance the ability to perform analysis and feature detection tasks while interrogating the data at interactive rates. We explore the performance of these algorithms and demonstrate their effectiveness using several large data sets.
Keywords: Interactive particle visualization, Global illumination, Ray tracing
T. Ize, I. Wald, S.G. Parker.
“Ray Tracing with the BSP Tree,” In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 2008, pp. 159--166. 2008.
DOI: 10.1109/RT.2008.4634637
One of the most fundamental concepts in computer graphics is binary space subdivision. In its purest form, this concept leads to binary space partitioning trees (BSP trees) with arbitrarily oriented space partitioning planes. In practice, however, most algorithms use kd-trees-a special case of BSP trees that restrict themselves to axis-aligned planes-since BSP trees are believed to be numerically unstable, costly to traverse, and intractable to build well. In this paper, we show that this is not true. Furthermore, after optimizing our general BSP traversal to also have a fast kd-tree style traversal path for axis-aligned splitting planes, we show it is indeed possible to build a general BSP based ray tracer that is highly competitive with state of the art BVH and kd-tree based systems. We demonstrate our ray tracer on a variety of scenes, and show that it is always competitive with-and often superior to-state of the art BVH and kd-tree based ray tracers.
Keywords: rt, ray tracing, bsp tree
S. Klasky, M. Vouk, M. Parashar, A. Khan, N. Podhorszki, R. Barreto, D. Silver, S.G. Parker.
“Collaborative Visualization Spaces for Petascale Simulations,” In Proceedings of 2008 International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems (CTS 2008), pp. 203--211. 2008.
DOI: 10.1109/CTS.2008.4543933
Y. Livnat, S.G. Parker, C.R. Johnson.
“Fast Isosurface Extraction Methods for Large Image Data Sets,” In Handbook of Medical Image Processing and Analysis, 2nd edition, Ch. 47, Note: (to appear), Edited by Isaac N. Bankman, Elsevier, pp. 801--816. 2008.
V. Pegoraro, I. Wald, S.G. Parker.
“Sequential Monte Carlo Adaptation in Low-Anisotropy Participating Media,” In Proceedings of the 19th Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, pp. 1097--1104. 2008.
V. Pegoraro, C. Brownlee, P.S. Shirley, S.G. Parker.
“Towards Interactive Global Illumination Effects via Sequential Monte Carlo Adaptation,” In Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, pp. 107--114. 2008.
I. Wald, T. Ize, S.G. Parker.
“Fast, Parallel, and Asynchronous Construction of BVHs for Ray Tracing Animated Scenes,” In Computers and Graphics, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 3--13. February, 2008.
S. Yau, K. Damevski, D. Zorin, V. Karamcheti, S.G. Parker.
“Result Reuse in Design Space Exploration: A Study in System Support for Interactive Parallel Computing,” In Proceedings of the 22nd International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2008), Miami, Florida, pp. 1--12. 2008.
2007
E.W. Bethel, C.R. Johnson, K. Joy, S. Ahern, V. Pascucci, H. Childs, J. Cohen, M. Duchaineau, B. Hamann, C.D. Hansen, D. Laney, P. Lindstrom, J. Meredith, G. Ostrouchov, S.G. Parker, C.T. Silva, A.R. Sanderson, X. Tricoche.
“SciDAC Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technology,” In Journal of Physics, Conference Series, Vol. 78, No. 012032, pp. (published online). 2007.
E.W. Bethel, C.R. Johnson, C. Aragon, Prabhat, O. Rübel, G. Weber, V. Pascucci, H. Childs, P.-T. Bremer, B. Whitlock, S. Ahern, J. Meredith, G. Ostrouchov, K. Joy, B. Hamann, C. Garth, M. Cole, C.D. Hansen, S.G. Parker, A.R. Sanderson, C.T. Silva, X. Tricoche.
“DOE's SciDAC Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies - Strategy for Petascale Visual Data Analysis Success,” In CTWatch Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2007.