111 research outputs found
ArrayBridge: Interweaving declarative array processing with high-performance computing
Scientists are increasingly turning to datacenter-scale computers to produce
and analyze massive arrays. Despite decades of database research that extols
the virtues of declarative query processing, scientists still write, debug and
parallelize imperative HPC kernels even for the most mundane queries. This
impedance mismatch has been partly attributed to the cumbersome data loading
process; in response, the database community has proposed in situ mechanisms to
access data in scientific file formats. Scientists, however, desire more than a
passive access method that reads arrays from files.
This paper describes ArrayBridge, a bi-directional array view mechanism for
scientific file formats, that aims to make declarative array manipulations
interoperable with imperative file-centric analyses. Our prototype
implementation of ArrayBridge uses HDF5 as the underlying array storage library
and seamlessly integrates into the SciDB open-source array database system. In
addition to fast querying over external array objects, ArrayBridge produces
arrays in the HDF5 file format just as easily as it can read from it.
ArrayBridge also supports time travel queries from imperative kernels through
the unmodified HDF5 API, and automatically deduplicates between array versions
for space efficiency. Our extensive performance evaluation in NERSC, a
large-scale scientific computing facility, shows that ArrayBridge exhibits
statistically indistinguishable performance and I/O scalability to the native
SciDB storage engine.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figure
Cross-Platform Presentation of Interactive Volumetric Imagery
Volume data is useful across many disciplines, not just medicine.
Thus, it is very important that researchers have a simple and
lightweight method of sharing and reproducing such volumetric
data. In this paper, we explore some of the challenges associated
with volume rendering, both from a classical sense and from the
context of Web3D technologies. We describe and evaluate the pro-
posed X3D Volume Rendering Component and its associated styles
for their suitability in the visualization of several types of image
data. Additionally, we examine the ability for a minimal X3D node
set to capture provenance and semantic information from outside
ontologies in metadata and integrate it with the scene graph
How to Extract the Geometry and Topology from Very Large 3D Segmentations
Segmentation is often an essential intermediate step in image analysis. A
volume segmentation characterizes the underlying volume image in terms of
geometric information--segments, faces between segments, curves in which
several faces meet--as well as a topology on these objects. Existing algorithms
encode this information in designated data structures, but require that these
data structures fit entirely in Random Access Memory (RAM). Today, 3D images
with several billion voxels are acquired, e.g. in structural neurobiology.
Since these large volumes can no longer be processed with existing methods, we
present a new algorithm which performs geometry and topology extraction with a
runtime linear in the number of voxels and log-linear in the number of faces
and curves. The parallelizable algorithm proceeds in a block-wise fashion and
constructs a consistent representation of the entire volume image on the hard
drive, making the structure of very large volume segmentations accessible to
image analysis. The parallelized C++ source code, free command line tools and
MATLAB mex files are avilable from
http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/software.phpComment: C++ source code, free command line tools and MATLAB mex files are
avilable from http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/software.ph
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