Steve Parker Listed Among HPCwire's 2006 "People to Watch"
Parker, Steve Research Assistant Professor University of Utah
"The impact of high-performance computing on society has been astounding, but I believe that we are just starting to see the tip of the iceberg. HPC is going to play an integral role in tackling many of the world's toughest scientific challenges as we continue through the 21st century, and will shape our national policy, our laws, and even our health." - Steve Parker
Why he's worth watching: As Research Assistant Professor at the University of Utah, Steve Parker specializes in HPC environments, focusing on tackling the toughest multi-scale, multi-physics computational challenges. "I believe that the HPC community needs more effective ways to bring large-scale machines to bear on a vast array of challenges," explains Parker. "Software that is easy to understand, reusable, robust, and reliable is vital to achieving the promise of HPC. We need software that can compute, manage, analyze, and visualize data in a much more straightforward manner, and it must scale to solve problems both large and small."
SCI is pleased to announce the launch of our new NCRR Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing (CIBC), a five year extension of our previous NCRR center but with a new broader scope. With the new center, we will be conducting exciting research and development that builds upon the successes of previous investments, enhancing our existing strengths, and responding to a set of compelling new biomedical problems. We will continue to develop integrated problem solving environments that make advanced computational tools available to biomedical scientists. We will also continue to pursue advanced research in technical and biophysical approaches to bioelectric field problems in cardiology and neurology. Since the founding of our original NCRR Center, software research has evolved, and so too has our vision of how we can best design software to have the most impact on biomedical research. Integration is still at the core of this vision, though in order to more effectively serve researchers using other systems, we are moving away from our previous strategy of absorbing and incorporating other software into our system to what we call "bridging", in which we provide researchers with the flexibility to link to whatever software systems will meet their needs.
Mike Kirby joins us from Brown University.The focus of his research focus deals with large- scale scientific computing and visualization, with an emphasis on the scientific cycle of mathematical modeling, computation, visualization, evaluation, and understanding. His primary research interests are: Computational Science and Engineering, Concurrent Programming, Scientific Visualization, Interdisciplinary Collaboration across Computer Science, Engineering, Applied Math, Computational Steering, and High Performance Computing.
Martin Berzins joins us from the University of Leeds where he is also Professor of Scientific Computing, Co-director of the Computational PDEs Unit, and head of the Scientific Computing and Visualization research group. His primary interests are in the fields of Adaptive Numerical Methods and software, Unstructured Tetrahedral Meshes, Reacting Flows, Time Dependent PDEs, Parallel Algorithms, and Computational Fluid and Solid Mechanics Applications.
SCIRun/BioPSE 1.24.2 Now Available
Thanks to everyone for their feedback on the 1.24.0-beta pre-release. Based on your suggestions, we fixed important bugs over the past few weeks, and we added many great new features as well.
This version of SCIRun/BioPSE contains a new PowerApp called "BioImage" for the processing and visualization of medical image volumes. With BioImage users can directly load a variety of native data formats (e.g. DICOM, Analyze, VFF, NRRD, PICT) and can apply processing algorithms to specify and enhance regions of interest within the volume (e.g. cropping, resampling, histogram equalization, median filtering, contrast / brightness). The BioImage visual interface allows users to interact with their data both in 2D "slice views" (powered by the new ViewSlices module), as well as in a full 3D "volume rendering view" (powered by our new high-performance volume rendering modules). Users can seamlessly move between the 2D and 3D views to precisely control how different features of their data are displayed, and to gain both quantitative and qualitative insights.
The SCI Institute is proud to announce the availability of SCIRun on the Silicon Graphics PrismTM visualization system. The combination of large memory, parallel CPUs and advanced graphics capabilities on the Silicon Graphics Prism provide an ideal platform for the SCIRun problem solving environment. The modular nature of the Silicon Graphics Prism allows scaling to meet the computational needs of the most demanding SCIRun users.
Using SCIRun's advanced volume rendering PowerApp 'BioImage' we are able to fully exploit the powerful graphics capabilities of the Prism system. The combination with BioImage, the Prism's graphics capabilities and a 64-bit architecture allow for interactive visualization of very large datasets.
By PR and Business Wire News, 9/12/2005 03:36:02 PM MT Utah Governor Jon M. Huntsman, Jr., has appointed Gregory M. Jones, PhD as the new State Science Advisor. The position is part of the Governor's Office of Economic Development (GOED) and oversees the state's economic clusters to create jobs.
Before joining state government, Dr. Jones was the associate director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute in Salt Lake City and an adjunct assistant professor of Radiology at the University of Utah. He was also president and chief operations officer of Visual Influence Inc., a spin-off company of SCI.
Chris Johnson Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Chris Johnson, a distinguished professor of computer science and director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, has been elected by his peers as a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Johnson is one of 376 AAAS members who were given the distinction this year "because of their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished," the group says. Johnson specifically was cited "for distinguished contributions to scientific computing and scientific visualization." The AAAS, founded in 1848, is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, which has an estimated total readership of 1 million.
Chuck Hansen Receives IEEE 2005 Visualization Technical Achievement Award
Dr. Chuck Hansen has been awarded the 2005 Visualization Technical Achievement Award by the Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee of the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE VGTC). The award is in recognition of "seminal work on tools for understanding large-scale scientific data sets".
This is an international award and is the highest honor and recognition in visualization research. The IEEE VGTC started this award just last year, so Chuck is the second recipient of the IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award.
Nvidia Fellowship Awarded
SCI graduate student Guo-Shi Li was selected among many applications for an Nvidia fellowship. This was a highly competitive process and is a great honor for him. Guo-Shi Li's graduate advisor is SCI faculty member Chuck Hansen.
Chris Johnson Testifies Before Senate Sub-Committee
Chris Johnson, SCI Institute director, testified June 23rd on Capitol Hill before the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus. His presentation, "Computing the Future of Biomedicine," had a very large turnout, with more than 90 Senate and Congressional Staffers, NIH, NSF and other funding agencies staff, and Congressmen in attendance.
Rush Holt (Rep. New Jersey) followed up Johnson's presentation with a plea for more funding for fundamental research.
SCI Announces the Publication of "The Visualization Handbook"
The SCI Institute announces the publication of "The Visualization Handbook," edited by two of SCI visualization faculty, Prof. Charles D. Hansen and Prof. Christopher R. Johnson. This book brings together top experts in the field of scientific visualization to cover state of the art techniques being applied to current scientific problems. A number of the SCI Institute's faculty, research staff, and Ph.D. students have also contributed to the book including Prof. Stephen G. Parker, Prof. Yarden Livnat, Prof. Mike Kirby, Dr. Gordon Kindlmann, Dr. Xavier Tricoche, Joe Kniss, Milan Ikits, and Dean Brederson. Copies may be purchased on the Elsevier web site.