SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING AND IMAGING INSTITUTE
at the University of Utah

The task-based approach to software and parallelism is well-known and has been proposed as a potential candidate, named the silver model, for exascale software. This approach is not yet widely used in the large-scale multi-core parallel computing of complex systems of partial differential equations. After surveying task-based approaches we investigate how well the Uintah software and an extension named Wasatch fit in the task-based paradigm and how well they perform on large scale parallel computers. The conclusion is that these approaches show great promise for petascale but that considerable algorithmic challenges remain.

Keywords: DOD, Uintah, CSAFE

The placement of tasks in a parallel application on specific nodes of a supercomputer can significantly impact performance. Traditionally, this task mapping has focused on reducing the distance between communicating tasks on the physical network. This minimizes the number of hops that point-to-point messages travel and thus reduces link sharing between messages and contention. However, for applications that use collectives over sub-communicators, this heuristic may not be optimal. Many collectives can benefit from an increase in bandwidth even at the cost of an increase in hop count, especially when sending large messages. For example, placing communicating tasks in a cube configuration rather than a plane or a line on a torus network increases the number of possible paths messages might take. This increases the available bandwidth which can lead to significant performance gains.

We have developed Rubik, a tool that provides a simple and intuitive interface to create a wide variety of mappings for structured communication patterns. Rubik supports a number of elementary operations such as splits, tilts, or shifts, that can be combined into a large number of unique patterns. Each operation can be applied to disjoint groups of processes involved in collectives to increase the effective bandwidth. We demonstrate the use of Rubik for improving performance of two parallel codes, pF3D and Qbox, which use collectives over sub-communicators.

Ray tracing in scientific visualization allows for substantial gains in performance and rendering quality with large scale polygonal datasets compared to brute-force rasterization, however implementing new rendering architectures into existing tools is often costly and time consuming. This paper presents a library, GLuRay, which intercepts OpenGL calls from many common visualization applications and renders them with the CPU ray tracer Manta without modification to the underlying visualization tool. Rendering polygonal models such as isosurfaces can be done identically to an OpenGL implementation using provided material and camera properties or superior rendering can be achieved using enhanced settings such as dielectric materials or pinhole cameras with depth of field effects. Comparative benchmarks were conducted on the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s Longhorn cluster using the popular visualization packages ParaView, VisIt, Ensight, and VAPOR. Through the parallel ren- dering package ParaView, scaling up to 64 nodes is demonstrated. With our tests we show that using OpenGL interception to accelerate and enhance visualization programs provides a viable enhancement to existing tools with little overhead and no code modification while allowing for the creation of publication quality renderings using advanced effects and greatly improved large-scale software rendering performance within tools that scientists are currently using.

Keywords: kaust, scidac

Large-scale analysis and visualization is becoming increasingly important as supercomputers and their simulations produce larger and larger data. These large data sizes are pushing the limits of traditional rendering algorithms and tools thus motivating a study exploring these limits and their possible resolutions through alternative rendering algorithms . In order to better understand real-world performance with large data, this paper presents a detailed timing study on a large cluster with the widely used visualization tools ParaView and VisIt. The software ray tracer Manta was integrated into these programs in order to show that improved performance could be attained with software ray tracing on a distributed memory, GPU enabled, parallel visualization resource. Using the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s Longhorn cluster which has multi-core CPUs and GPUs with large-scale polygonal data, we find multi-core CPU ray tracing to be significantly faster than both software rasterization and hardware-accelerated rasterization in existing scientific visualization tools with large data.

Keywords: kaust, scidac

We introduce a new algorithm for generating tetrahedral meshes that conform to physical boundaries in volumetric domains consisting of multiple materials. The proposed method allows for an arbitrary number of materials, produces high-quality tetrahedral meshes with upper and lower bounds on dihedral angles, and guarantees geometric delity. Moreover, the method is combinatoric so its implementation enables rapid mesh construction. These meshes are structured in a way that also allows grading, in order to reduce element counts in regions of homogeneity.

We present a particle-based approach for generating adaptive triangular surface and tetrahedral volume meshes from computer-aided design models. Input shapes are treated as a collection of smooth, parametric surface patches that can meet non-smoothly on boundaries. Our approach uses a hierarchical sampling scheme that places particles on features in order of increasing dimensionality. These particles reach a good distribution by minimizing an energy computed in 3D world space, with movements occurring in the parametric space of each surface patch. Rather than using a pre-computed measure of feature size, our system automatically adapts to both curvature as well as a notion of topological separation. It also enforces a measure of smoothness on these constraints to construct a sizing field that acts as a proxy to piecewise-smooth feature size. We evaluate our technique with comparisons against other popular triangular meshing techniques for this domain.

In recent years there has been significant growth in the use of patient-specific models to predict the effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS). However, translating these models from a research environment to the everyday clinical workflow has been a challenge. In this paper, we deploy the interactive visualization system ImageVis3D Mobile in an evaluation environment to visualize models of Parkinson’s disease patients who received DBS therapy. We used ImageVis3D Mobile to provide models to movement disorders clinicians and asked them to use the software to determine: 1) which of the four DBS electrode contacts they would select for therapy; and 2) what stimulation settings they would choose. We compared the stimulation protocol chosen from the software versus the stimulation protocol that was chosen via clinical practice (independently of the study). Lastly, we compared the amount of time required to reach these settings using the software versus the time required through standard practice. We found that the stimulation settings chosen using ImageVis3D Mobile were similar to those used in standard of care, but were selected in drastically less time. We show how our visualization system can be used to guide clinical decision making for selection of DBS settings.

Keywords: scidac, dbs

As neuromodulation therapy has grown, so has the recognition that computational models can provide important insights into the design, operation, and clinical application of neurostimulation systems. Models of deep brain stimulation and spinal cord stimulation have advanced over recent decades from simple, stereotyped models to sophisticated patient-specific models that can incorporate many important details of the stimulation system and the attributes of individual subjects. Models have been used to make detailed predictions of the bioelectric fields produced during stimulation. These predictions have been used as a starting point for further analyses such as stimulation safety, neural response, neurostimulation system design, or clinical outcomes. This chapter provides a review of recent advances and anticipated future directions in computational modeling of neuromodulation.

Background: Increasing evidence suggests that autism is a disorder of distributed neural networks that may exhibit abnormal developmental trajectories. Characterization of white matter early in the developmental course of the disorder is critical to understanding these aberrant trajectories.

Methods: A cross-sectional study of 2-6 year old children with autism was conducted using diffusion tensor imaging combined with a novel statistical approach employing fractional anisotropy distributions. 58 children aged 18-79 months were imaged: 33 were diagnosed with autism, 8 with general developmental delay (DD), and 17 were typically developing (TD). Fractional anisotropy values within global white matter, cortical lobes, and the cerebellum were measured and transformed to random F distributions for each subject. Each distribution of values for a region was summarized by estimating delta, the estimated mean and standard deviation of the approximating F for each distribution.

Results: The estimated delta parameter, delta-hat, was significantly decreased in individuals with autism compared to the combined control group. This was true in all cortical lobes, as well as in the cerebellum, but differences were strongest in the temporal lobe. Predicted developmental trajectories of delta-hat across the age range in the sample showed patterns that partially distinguished the groups. Exploratory analyses suggested that the variability, rather than the central tendency, component of delta-hat was the driving force behind these results. Conclusions: White matter in young children with autism appears to be abnormally homogeneous, which may reflect poorly organized or differentiated pathways, particularly in the temporal lobe, which is important for social and emotional cognition.

Objective
During neovascularization, the end result is a new functional microcirculation composed of a network of mature microvessels with specific topologies. Although much is known concerning the mechanisms underlying the initiation of angiogenesis, it remains unclear how the final architecture of microcirculatory beds is regulated. To begin to address this, we determined the impact of angiogenic neovessel prepatterning on the final microvascular network topology using a model of implant neovascularization.

Methods and Results
We used 3D direct-write bioprinting or physical constraints in a manner permitting postangiogenesis vascular remodeling and adaptation to pattern angiogenic microvascular precursors (neovessels formed from isolated microvessel segments) in 3D collagen gels before implantation and subsequent network formation. Neovasculatures prepatterned into parallel arrays formed functional networks after 4 weeks postimplantation but lost the prepatterned architecture. However, maintenance of uniaxial physical constraints during postangiogenesis remodeling of the implanted neovasculatures produced networks with aligned microvessels, as well as an altered proportional distribution of arterioles, capillaries, and venules.

Conclusion
Here we show that network topology resulting from implanted microvessel precursors is independent from prepatterning of precursors but can be influenced by a patterning stimulus involving tissue deformation during postangiogenesis remodeling and maturation.

Liquid–liquid extraction is a typical multi-fluid problem in chemical engineering where two types of immiscible fluids are mixed together. Mixing of two-phase fluids results in a time-varying fluid density distribution, quantitatively indicating the presence of liquid phases. For engineers who design extraction devices, it is crucial to understand the density distribution of each fluid, particularly flow regions that have a high concentration of the dispersed phase. The propagation of regions of high density can be studied by examining the topology of isosurfaces of the density data. We present a topology-based approach to track the splitting and merging events of these regions using the Reeb graphs. Time is used as the third dimension in addition to two-dimensional (2D) point-based simulation data. Due to low time resolution of the input data set, a physics-based interpolation scheme is required in order to improve the accuracy of the proposed topology tracking method. The model used for interpolation produces a smooth time-dependent density field by applying Lagrangian-based advection to the given simulated point cloud data, conforming to the physical laws of flow evolution. Using the Reeb graph, the spatial and temporal locations of bifurcation and merging events can be readily identified supporting in-depth analysis of the extraction process.

Malfatti's problem, first published in 1803, is commonly understood to ask fitting three circles into a given triangle such that they are tangent to each other, externally, and such that each circle is tangent to a pair of the triangle's sides. There are many solutions based on geometric constructions, as well as generalizations in which the triangle sides are assumed to be circle arcs. A generalization that asks to fit six circles into the triangle, tangent to each other and to the triangle sides, has been considered a good example of a problem that requires sophisticated numerical iteration to solve by computer. We analyze this problem and show how to solve it quickly.

Keywords: Malfatti's problem, circle packing, geometric constraint solving, GPU programming

We demonstrate the application of topological analysis techniques to the rather unexpected domain of software visualization. We collect a memory reference trace from a running program, recasting the linear flow of trace records as a high-dimensional point cloud in a metric space. We use topological persistence to automatically detect significant circular structures in the point cloud, which represent recurrent or cyclical runtime program behaviors. We visualize such recurrences using radial plots to display their time evolution, offering multi-scale visual insights, and detecting potential candidates for memory performance optimization. We then present several case studies to demonstrate some key insights obtained using our techniques.

Keywords: scidac

The current work presents a computational pipeline to simulate transcranial direct current stimulation from image based models of the head with SCIRun [15]. The pipeline contains all the steps necessary to carry out the simulations and is supported by a complete suite of open source software tools: image visualization, segmentation, mesh generation, tDCS electrode generation and efficient tDCS forward simulation.

In this paper, we propose a new method for longitudinal shape analysis that ts a linear mixed-eects model, while simultaneously optimizing correspondences on a set of anatomical shapes. Shape changes are modeled in a hierarchical fashion, with the global population trend as a xed eect and individual trends as random eects. The statistical signi cance of the estimated trends are evaluated using speci cally designed permutation tests. We also develop a permutation test based on the Hotelling T² statistic to compare the average shapes trends between two populations. We demonstrate the bene ts of our method on a synthetic example of longitudinal tori and data from a developmental neuroimaging study.

Keywords: Computer Science

There are many applications in MRI where it is desirable to have high spatial and high temporal resolution. This can be achieved by undersampling of k-space and requires special techniques for reconstruction. Even if undersampling artifacts are removed, sharpness of the edges can be a problem. We propose a new technique that uses the gradient from a reference image to improve the quality of the edges in the reconstructed image along with a spatio-temporal constraint to reduce aliasing artifacts and noise. The reference is created from undersampled dynamic data by combining several adjacent frames. The method was tested on undersampled radial DCE MRI data with little respiratory motion. The proposed method was compared to reconstruction using the spatio-temporal constrained reconstruction. Sharper edges and an increase in the contrast was observed by using the proposed method.

A GPU implementation is given for real-time visualization of aggregate eye movements (gaze) via heatmaps. Parallelization of the algorithm leads to substantial speedup over its CPU-based implementation and, for the first time, allows real-time rendering of heatmaps atop video. GLSL shader colorization allows the choice of color ramps. Several luminance-based color maps are advocated as alternatives to the popular rainbow color map, considered inappropriate (harmful) for depiction of (relative) gaze distributions.

Statistical analysis of shapes, performed by constructing an atlas composed of an average model of shapes within a population and associated deformation maps, is a fundamental aspect of medical imaging studies. Usual methods for constructing a shape atlas require point correspondences across subjects, which are difficult in practice. By contrast, methods based on currents do not require correspondence. However, existing atlas construction methods using currents suffer from two limitations. First, the template current is not in the form of a topologically correct mesh, which makes direct analysis on shapes difficult. Second, the deformations are parametrized by vectors at the same location as the normals of the template current which often provides a parametrization that is more dense than required. In this paper, we propose a novel method for constructing shape atlases using currents where topology of the template is preserved and deformation parameters are optimized independently of the shape parameters. We use an L¹-type prior that enables us to adaptively compute sparse and low dimensional parameterization of deformations.We show an application of our method for comparing anatomical shapes of patients with Down’s syndrome and healthy controls, where the sparse parametrization of diffeomorphisms decreases the parameter dimension by one order of magnitude.