Using Interactive Simulation to Extend Access to Learning Along the Historic Tour Route of Mammoth Cave National Park

This poster presentation displays work of a current project to address the problem of limited inclusion to field-based learning experiences for students with physical disabilities. Led by researchers at Georgia State University, Ohio State University and Mammoth Cave International Center for Science and Learning, the overall objective of the project is through integration of emerging simulation technologies and techniques, to provide a rich virtual environment of a geological field site for students with mobility impairments. Through the development of a synthetic field-based module that employs a virtual environment that interchangeably uses two and three-dimensional representation for presenting an alternative to field experience, this project will assess the effectiveness in engaging the student community and its efficacy in the curriculum when used as an alternative representation of field experience. The expected outcome is that the emulation would preclude the need for physical presence within the traditional field site, and provide adequate pedagogical representation for content transfer. Additionally, creating such an environment will impact all able-bodied students by providing supplemental resources that can both precede a traditional field experience and allow for visitors to re-examine a field site long after a field trip, in both current formal and informal educational settings. Based on the identified need to accommodate students with mobility impairments in field-based instructional experiences, this talk will present a virtual recreation of Mammoth Cave National Park, describing the potential for including all students in remotely accessing cave and karst field studies, regardless of their physical abilities

Capture and Review of Interactive Volumetric Manipulations for Surgical Training

In this paper, we present a system to capture efficiently a given user’s interaction with a simulation system involving the procedural removal of material inside a volume, and to allow for a full 3D, lossless reviewing of that interaction at a later date. We describe an extension of this system to enable reviewing to occur at arbitrary points in the surgical procedure. The extension uses a combination of volume snapshots and event recording to be efficient in both time and space requirements

PARAVOL: Parallel Volume Rendering for Virtual Medicine

: PARAVOL is a system under construction that combines software and hardware renderers. The system consists of the Fuzzy-Set Renderer (FSR), which runs on a Silicon Graphics Reality Engine, and the Active Ray-Tracer (ART), which runs on the Cray T3D. FSR utilizes hardware-based texture mapping to deliver real-time, medium quality, volume rendered images. It is geared mainly to provide a navigation aid and a tool for preliminary data exploration. Interaction is multisensory, combining various input devices and future haptic feedback. Rendering parameters are passed from the FSR front end to the ART renderer. It is based on a ray-stacking mechanism that supports latency hiding by postponing computation on inactive rays. It optimizes memory usage and utilizes a cache-only-memory organization to achieve high quality rendering while demonstrating linear speedup. 1 Introduction Volume-based systems are becoming attractive as processing power and memory capacity of today's systems approach a ..

Adaptivity and Predictable Performance

Simultaneous advances in processor and network technologies have made clusters of workstations attractive vehicles for high-performance computing. Emerging applications targeted for clusters are inherently interactive and collaborative in nature. These applications demand end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) in addition to performance. Achieving predictable performance and ability to exploit resource adaptivity are also common requirements of these next generation applications. Providing QoS mechanisms for clusters to satisfy the demands of next generation application is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a QoS framework that provides bandwidth guarantees for communication within a cluster. The framework consists of a novel Network Interface Card (NIC)-based rate control mechanism and a coordinated admission control/scheduling mechanism. An interface is developed so that applications using the common Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard can specify bandwidth requirements of their flows to the underlying network. The framework is developed and evaluated on a Myrinet cluster testbed for a range of scientific and visualization applications. The experimental evaluations demonstrate the various advantages (predictability, resource adaptability, and end-to-end QoS) associated with the framework. The proposed framework is quite unique and is the first of its kind in the literature to support next generation interactive and collaborative applications on clusters

A QoS Framework for Clusters to Support Applications with

Simultaneous advances in processor and network technologies have made clusters of workstations attractive vehicles for high-performance computing. Emerging applications targeted for clusters are inherently interactive and collaborative in nature. These applications demand end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) in addition to performance. Achieving predictable performance and ability to exploit resource adaptivity are also common requirements of these next generation applications. Providing QoS mechanisms for clusters to satisfy the demands of next generation applications is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a QoS framework that provides bandwidth guarantees for communication within a cluster. The framework consists of a novel Network Interface Card (NIC)-based rate control mechanism and a coordinated admission control/scheduling mechanism. An interface is developed so that applications using the common Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard can specify bandwidth requirements of their flows to the underlying network. The framework is developed and evaluated on a Myrinet cluster testbed for a range of scientific and visualization applications. The experimental evaluations demonstrate the various advantages such as predictability and resource adaptability associated with the framework. The proposed framework is quite unique and is the first of its kind in the literature to support next generation interactive and collaborative applications on clusters