The International Grid (iGrid): Empowering Global Research Community Networking Using High Performance International Internet Services

The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Indiana University collaborated on a major research demonstration at the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing '98 (SC'98) conference in Orlando, Florida, November 7-13, 1998, to showcase the evolution and importance of global research community networking. Collaborators worked together to solve complex computational problems using advanced high-speed networks to access geographically-distributed computing, storage, and display resources. It is the collection of computing and communication resources that we refer to as the International Grid (iGrid). This paper presents an overview of the grid testbed, some of the underlying technologies used to enable distributed computing and collaborative problem solving, and descriptions of the applications. It concludes with recommendations for the future of global research community networking, based on the experiences of iGrid participants from the USA, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland, Singapore, and Taiwan

Immersive Insights: A Hybrid Analytics System for Collaborative Exploratory Data Analysis

In the past few years, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies have experienced terrific improvements in both accessibility and hardware capabilities, encouraging the application of these devices across various domains. While researchers have demonstrated the possible advantages of AR and VR for certain data science tasks, it is still unclear how these technologies would perform in the context of exploratory data analysis (EDA) at large. In particular, we believe it is important to better understand which level of immersion EDA would concretely benefit from, and to quantify the contribution of AR and VR with respect to standard analysis workflows. In this work, we leverage a Dataspace reconfigurable hybrid reality environment to study how data scientists might perform EDA in a co-located, collaborative context. Specifically, we propose the design and implementation of Immersive Insights, a hybrid analytics system combining high-resolution displays, table projections, and augmented reality (AR) visualizations of the data. We conducted a two-part user study with twelve data scientists, in which we evaluated how different levels of data immersion affect the EDA process and compared the performance of Immersive Insights with a state-of-the-art, non-immersive data analysis system.Comment: VRST 201

Interactive Visualization In A High Performance Computing Virtual Environment

An intuitive means of controlling numerical simulations can be achieved by integrating virtual environments with High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. The Cosmic Worm is an HPC visualization tool which runs in the CAVE virtual reality theater. It is designed to visualize the three-dimensional output from a numerical simulation while giving a scientist interactive control of that simulation from within a virtual environment. It is being developed in collaboration with the Astrophysics and Gravitation groups at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Both groups are finding this to be a valuable research tool in their studies of cosmic phenomena. For the first time they have the ability to steer their three-dimensional simulations, and visualization in the CAVE has enabled them to see aspects of the data which had not appeared in standard workstation visualizations. INTRODUCTION Visualization is not only a tool for understanding data but can also create an int..

Surround-screen projection-based virtual reality: The design and implementation of the CAVE

Abstract Several common systems satisfy some but not all of the VR This paper describes the CAVE (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment) virtual reality/scientific visualization system in detail and demonstrates that projection technology applied to virtual-reality goals achieves a system that matches the quality of workstation screens in terms of resolution, color, and flicker-free stereo. In addition, this format helps reduce the effect of common tracking and system latency errors. The off-axis perspective projection techniques we use are shown to be simple and straightforward. Our techniques for doing multi-screen stereo vision are enumerated, and design barriers, past and current, are described. Advantages and disadvantages of the projection paradigm are discussed, with an analysis of the effect of tracking noise and delay on the user. Successive refinement, a necessary tool for scientific visualization, is developed in the virtual reality context. The use of the CAVE as a one-to-many presentatio

Cosmic Worm In The Cave: Steering A High Performance Computing Application From A Virtual Environment

Developing graphical interfaces to steer high performance scientific computations has been a research subject in recent years. Now, computational scientists are starting to use virtual reality environments to explore the results of their simulations. In most cases, the virtual reality environment acts on precomputed data; however, the use of virtual reality environments for the dynamic steering of distributed scientific simulations is a growing area of research. We present in this paper the initial design and implementation of a distributed system that uses our virtual reality environment, the CAVE, to control and steer scientific simulations being computed on remote supercomputers. We discuss some of the more relevant features of virtual reality interfaces, emphasizing those of the CAVE, describe the distributed system developed and present a scientific application, the Cosmic Worm, that makes extensive use of the distributed system. 1. Introduction Visualization and virtual reality..