10,694 research outputs found
VisIVOWeb: A WWW Environment for Large-Scale Astrophysical Visualization
This article presents a newly developed Web portal called VisIVOWeb that aims
to provide the astrophysical community with powerful visualization tools for
large-scale data sets in the context of Web 2.0. VisIVOWeb can effectively
handle modern numerical simulations and real-world observations. Our
open-source software is based on established visualization toolkits offering
high-quality rendering algorithms. The underlying data management is discussed
with the supported visualization interfaces and movie-making functionality. We
introduce VisIVOWeb Network, a robust network of customized Web portals for
visual discovery, and VisIVOWeb Connect, a lightweight and efficient solution
for seamlessly connecting to existing astrophysical archives. A significant
effort has been devoted for ensuring interoperability with existing tools by
adhering to IVOA standards. We conclude with a summary of our work and a
discussion on future developments
Multiple Uncertainties in Time-Variant Cosmological Particle Data
Though the mediums for visualization are limited, the potential dimensions of a dataset are not. In many areas of scientific study, understanding the correlations between those dimensions and their uncertainties is pivotal to mining useful information from a dataset. Obtaining this insight can necessitate visualizing the many relationships among temporal, spatial, and other dimensionalities of data and its uncertainties. We utilize multiple views for interactive dataset exploration and selection of important features, and we apply those techniques to the unique challenges of cosmological particle datasets. We show how interactivity and incorporation of multiple visualization techniques help overcome the problem of limited visualization dimensions and allow many types of uncertainty to be seen in correlation with other variables
GPU Accelerated Particle Visualization with Splotch
Splotch is a rendering algorithm for exploration and visual discovery in
particle-based datasets coming from astronomical observations or numerical
simulations. The strengths of the approach are production of high quality
imagery and support for very large-scale datasets through an effective mix of
the OpenMP and MPI parallel programming paradigms. This article reports our
experiences in re-designing Splotch for exploiting emerging HPC architectures
nowadays increasingly populated with GPUs. A performance model is introduced
for data transfers, computations and memory access, to guide our re-factoring
of Splotch. A number of parallelization issues are discussed, in particular
relating to race conditions and workload balancing, towards achieving optimal
performances. Our implementation was accomplished by using the CUDA programming
paradigm. Our strategy is founded on novel schemes achieving optimized data
organisation and classification of particles. We deploy a reference simulation
to present performance results on acceleration gains and scalability. We
finally outline our vision for future work developments including possibilities
for further optimisations and exploitation of emerging technologies.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures. Astronomy and Computing (2014
Interactive Visualization of the Largest Radioastronomy Cubes
3D visualization is an important data analysis and knowledge discovery tool,
however, interactive visualization of large 3D astronomical datasets poses a
challenge for many existing data visualization packages. We present a solution
to interactively visualize larger-than-memory 3D astronomical data cubes by
utilizing a heterogeneous cluster of CPUs and GPUs. The system partitions the
data volume into smaller sub-volumes that are distributed over the rendering
workstations. A GPU-based ray casting volume rendering is performed to generate
images for each sub-volume, which are composited to generate the whole volume
output, and returned to the user. Datasets including the HI Parkes All Sky
Survey (HIPASS - 12 GB) southern sky and the Galactic All Sky Survey (GASS - 26
GB) data cubes were used to demonstrate our framework's performance. The
framework can render the GASS data cube with a maximum render time < 0.3 second
with 1024 x 1024 pixels output resolution using 3 rendering workstations and 8
GPUs. Our framework will scale to visualize larger datasets, even of Terabyte
order, if proper hardware infrastructure is available.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, Accepted New Astronomy July 201
MOLNs: A cloud platform for interactive, reproducible and scalable spatial stochastic computational experiments in systems biology using PyURDME
Computational experiments using spatial stochastic simulations have led to
important new biological insights, but they require specialized tools, a
complex software stack, as well as large and scalable compute and data analysis
resources due to the large computational cost associated with Monte Carlo
computational workflows. The complexity of setting up and managing a
large-scale distributed computation environment to support productive and
reproducible modeling can be prohibitive for practitioners in systems biology.
This results in a barrier to the adoption of spatial stochastic simulation
tools, effectively limiting the type of biological questions addressed by
quantitative modeling. In this paper, we present PyURDME, a new, user-friendly
spatial modeling and simulation package, and MOLNs, a cloud computing appliance
for distributed simulation of stochastic reaction-diffusion models. MOLNs is
based on IPython and provides an interactive programming platform for
development of sharable and reproducible distributed parallel computational
experiments
VisIVO - Integrated Tools and Services for Large-Scale Astrophysical Visualization
VisIVO is an integrated suite of tools and services specifically designed for
the Virtual Observatory. This suite constitutes a software framework for
effective visual discovery in currently available (and next-generation) very
large-scale astrophysical datasets. VisIVO consists of VisiVO Desktop - a stand
alone application for interactive visualization on standard PCs, VisIVO Server
- a grid-enabled platform for high performance visualization and VisIVO Web - a
custom designed web portal supporting services based on the VisIVO Server
functionality. The main characteristic of VisIVO is support for
high-performance, multidimensional visualization of very large-scale
astrophysical datasets. Users can obtain meaningful visualizations rapidly
while preserving full and intuitive control of the relevant visualization
parameters. This paper focuses on newly developed integrated tools in VisIVO
Server allowing intuitive visual discovery with 3D views being created from
data tables. VisIVO Server can be installed easily on any web server with a
database repository. We discuss briefly aspects of our implementation of VisiVO
Server on a computational grid and also outline the functionality of the
services offered by VisIVO Web. Finally we conclude with a summary of our work
and pointers to future developments
- …