News
Claudio Silva Receives IBM Faculty Award for Third Year Running
has been honored once again with a coveted IBM Faculty Award. This award is designed to promote innovative, collaborative research and honor outstanding faculty working in disciplines of interest to IBM. It includes $30,000 to support ongoing research. Dr. Silva is being recognized for his continuing success in developing efficient rendering techniques for large-scale scientific visualization. The increase in computational power has enabled the generation of large and complex simulations. Scientists and engineers are now faced with an incredible amount of data to analyze. Despite considerable effort, techniques for the visualization of large datasets, common in scientific simulations, still take too long. In addition, most current techniques suffer from strict data size limitations due to the reliance on having the complete datasets in main memory. In order to address the interactivity and scalability requirements, the Dr. Silva and his team are developing novel out-of-core, streaming, and parallel algorithms for optimizing the visualization of large datasets. The development of scalable rendering algorithms is of key importance to the advancement of visualization, graphics, and computational science.
SCI Graduate Student Andrew Kensler Wins Mozy Coding Deathmatch
Andrew Kensler took the $10,000 grand prize in Mozy.com's Coding Deathmatch. The contest consisted of three timed rounds of competition, two preliminary rounds were held online and the final round at Mozy.com's American Fork (Utah) headquarters. Only the top eight contestants were allowed to proceed to the final round. Contestants were asked to write programs in any of nine possible languages to to solve a series of problems. The winning code was graded on it's ability to solve the problem in the least amount of execution time. The problem for the final round was to write a program that would read through a 2GB file of 20 million records of 100 bytes each. The first 8 bytes represented the key for that record and the remainder was a payload. The program had to write out a file containing just the records that would be in the 0, 1M, 2M, 3M... positions as sorted by the key values. Ties between keys were to be broken by original order in the file. Wall-clock execution time of the correct programs was used to decide the final ranking for the contest. Timings were done on a virtual machine with 1GB of RAM and 4GB of scratch disk space available.
SCIRun Meets CCA: SCIJump Released for Testing
SCIJump is a computational environment or framework based on the Common Component Architecture (CCA) standard for high performance component frameworks in the scientific computing domain. The SCIJump framework builds on the SCI Institute's SCIRun Problem Solving Environment and implements a parallel component and distributed computation architecture which can support a diverse set of component- based technologies.
Won-Ki Jeong Awarded NVIDIA Fellowship
SCI graduate student Won-Ki Jeong was selected as one of 10 applicants to be awarded the coveted NVIDIA Fellowship Award for 2007-2008. The NVIDIA Fellowship Program provides funding to Ph.D. students who are conducting research on topics which are expected to lead to major advances in the graphics and digital media industry, and are investigating innovative ways of leveraging the power of graphics hardware. Won-Ki Jeong's graduate adviser is SCI faculty member Dr. Ross T. Whitaker. For more information about the award, please see the NVIDIA press release "NVIDIA Awards Fellowships to Top Ph.D. Innovators."
map3d 6.5 Now Available
The Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute and the Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing are proud to announce the release of map3d version 6.5!This release includes a number of fixes and additions to the display settings for map3d and major new support for displaying time fiducials. The driving application for this was displaying maps of activation, recovery, start of QRS, etc., both as separate isochronal maps and superimposed on the scalar time series data. If you need this, you will love map3d's new capabilities.
Guido Gerig Joins Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute
Guido Gerig joins the University of Utah's Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute as a USTAR faculty member. The Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute has established itself as an international research leader in the areas of scientific computing, scientific visualization, and image processing. USTAR is an innovative, aggressive and far-reaching effort to bolster Utah's economy with high-paying jobs and keep the state vibrant in the Knowledge Age. The USTAR Support Coalition and the Salt Lake Chamber sought public and private investment to recruit world-class research teams in carefully targeted disciplines. These teams will develop products and services that can be commercialized in new businesses and industries.
Neuro Image Analysis Team Joins SCI Institute
 (L-R) Dr. Guido Gerig, Dr. Marcel Prastawa, Casey Goodlett, Sylvain Gouttard |
Announcing SCIRun/BioPSE 3.0
 BioPSE network computing the effects of electrode placement on the electrical field in the heart and hence evaluating the defibrillation threshold. |
The Biomedical Problem Solving Environment, or BioPSE, contains a suite of applications and integrated problem solving systems that have been specialized to meet the needs of scientists working in major fields of biomedicine. In order to design the best systems to meet real world needs, the CIBC has established collaborations with prominent scientists who are leaders in their fields. The goal of these collaborations is to develop software that is well suited to the needs of scientists working in these and related fields of biomedicine.
Three SCI Developers Among Winners of Mozy.com's Code Deathmatch
Competing individually in the Mozy Code Deathmatch, SCI developers McKay Davis, Michael Callahan and Bryan Worthen represented three of the eight finalists and shared in the grand prize of $10,000. This unique coding contest was conducted with two online preliminary rounds and a final round held at Mozy.com's American Fork (Utah) office. The first round, lasting just an hour, required contestants to solve six small programming puzzles. The second round challenged the remaining contestants with four more difficult problems. The eight finalists then were invited to Mozy.com's office to compete head-to-head. In the final round, the contestants were asked to write - in under ninety minutes - a small web server capable of handling 10,000 simultaneous connections. To assess the contestants' efforts, the judges then used a test client to connect and to establish a data connection with each server 10,000 times in a short period. Each server then had to sort the data and retrieve three specific pieces of the data. Although all finalists managed to develop a functioning server, none of their servers scaled well enough to meet the full scope of the challenge. After some debate, all agreed to declare the competition a tie and to split the prize money equally among the finalists.
SCI to Collaborate on Three New SciDAC Centers
The SCI Institute is pleased to announce that it will be participating in three DOE SciDAC 2 research centers.The Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies (VACET), includes SCI Institute faculty Chris Johnson (Center Co- PI with Wes Bethel from LBNL), Chuck Hansen, Steve Parker, Claudio Silva, Allen Sanderson and Xavier Tricoche. The center will focus on leveraging scientific visualization and analytics technology to increase scientific productivity and insight. It will be challenged with resolving one of the primary bottlenecks in contemporary science, making the massive amounts of data now available to scientists accessible and understandable. Advances in computational technology have resulted in an "information Big Bang," vastly increasing the amount of scientific data available, but also creating a significant challenge to reveal the structures, relationships, and anomalies hidden within the data. The VACET Center will respond to that challenge by adapting, extending, creating when necessary, and deploying visualization and data understanding technologies for the scientific community.
SCI Grad Student Helps Solve Open Problem in Computational Geometry
SCI graduate student Jason F. Shepherd and coauthor Carlos D. Carbonera have published a solution to Problem #27 of The Open Problems Project's list of unresolved problems in computational geometry. The question is:
Can the interior of every simply connected polyhedron whose surface is meshed by an even number of quadrilaterals be partitioned into a hexahedral mesh compatible with the surface meshing?The solution of Carbonera and Shepherd settles the practical aspects of the problem by demonstrating an explicit algorithm that extends a quadrilateral surface mesh to a hexahedral mesh where all the hexahedra have straight segment edges. This work did leave one aspect of the problem open. The authors did not resolve the question of achieving a hexahedral mesh with all planar faces. The collaborators are now working on a revision that should close this problem definitively.
C. D. Carbonera, J.F. Shepherd, "A Constructive Approach to Constrained Hexahedral Mesh Generation," Proceedings, 15th International Meshing Roundtable, Birmingham, AL, September 2006.