NCSA NEWS

Alliance Offers Virtual Tour of the Universe in SC2000 Booth

released November 7, 2000

Visitors to the National Computational Science Alliance research exhibit at SC2000 will have the chance to experience the history of the universe from the big bang to the present and fly through the Milky Way out to the Virgo Cluster during several demonstrations that will feature high resolution scientific data displayed on a scalable tiled wall and a plasma screen.

These demonstrations will feature data from actual observations and from simulations that were turned into animations using NCSA's Virtual Director Software. The same animations will be part of an upcoming episode of the PBS TV series Nova called "Runaway Universe." The episode, done in High Definition TV (HDTV) format, will air Nov. 21 at 9 p.m. EST (8 p.m. CST).

Virtual Director is a software program created by Donna Cox, an NCSA researcher and professor in the University of Illinois School of Art and Design, Robert Patterson of NCSA, and Marcus Thiebaux of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Stuart Levy of NCSA is in charge of maintaining and extending the application. Virtual Director allows researchers to navigate through complex scientific visualizations and record and edit their movements through the data with a virtual camera. In essence, the software allows the user to direct the simulation and create a movie. The Virtual Director demonstrations on the desktop will use a new optical tracker developed by NCSA's Rob Stein.

Two visualizations use actual data compiled from a database of 35,000 observed galaxies. The data is from Alliance Cosmology team member Brent Tully of the University of Hawaii and takes the viewer from the Earth, through the Milky Way, out to the Virgo Cluster and past nearby galaxies. That data then transitions into a final segment, a voyage through large-scale cosmic structures drawn from simulations done by Alliance Cosmology team members Jeremiah Ostriker and Paul Bode of Princeton University.

Another animated segment is taken from data computed by Michael Norman, a member of the Alliance Cosmology team at the University of California, San Diego. It depicts the history of the universe from the big bang to the present and ends with a "dive" into a galaxy.

Data from Norman's adaptive-mesh-refinement (AMR) simulation and others will also be examined on a scalable tiled wall using LCAVision, an Alliance Cosmology team interactive visualization tool used for detailed study of unigrid and multigrid field and particle datasets. LCAVision was developed in Norman's Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics by John Shalf, of NCSA and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Gala Wind, Brad Wind, and Matt Hall of NCSA.

SC2000, the annual high-performance computing and networking conference, will be held Nov. 4 - 10 in Dallas. Stop by the Alliance booth (R804) for information on demonstration times.

 

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