US116: Scientific Collaboration with Parallel Interactive 3D Visualizations of Earth Science Datasets

click on each image to enlarge

Bridget Smith describes her work on 3-D modeling of California deformation on the 100 megapixel LambdaVision.

Each tile on the LambdaVision displays the deformation for a certain year along a certain direction (Y velocity in this image).

All the datasets displayed on the LambdaVision were fetched from remote clusters (in San Diego, Chicago and Amsterdam) using DVC and GTP. Peak rates of 16 gbps were achieved.

Bridget Smith and NSF’s Steve Meacham look at 3D visualizations related to the Earth sciences.

iGrid URL: http://www.igrid2005.org/program/applications/vizservices_earth.html

Contact: Atul Nayak IGPP, SIO, UCSD

Collaborators:

• IGPP, SIO, UCSD, USA: Atul Nayak, Bridget Smith, Debi Kilb, Thomas Im, Dane Samilo, Graham Kent, John Orcutt
• Concurrent Systems Architecture Group, UCSD, USA: Nut Taesombut, Xinran (Ryan) Wu, Andrew A. Chien
• Jacob School of Engineering, UCSD, USA: Sean O’Connell, Max Okumoto, David Hutches
• Calit2, UCSD, USA: Aaron Chin
• Interactive Visualization Systems, Canada & USA: Mark Paton

Presentations and Flyers:

• Watch Nut Taesombut demonstrate DVC and GTP
  • MP4 video format
  • AVI video format
• Viewgraphs (download as a pdf)
• Explanatory Flyer (download as a pdf)

Velocity patterns for the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. (click on image to enlarge)

This is a demonstration of how multi-gigabyte objects can be shared between remote collaborating research sites using the OptIPuter computing and networking resources. The OptIPuter’s Distributed Virtual Computer (DVC) middleware is used to establish a collaborative environment with visualization endpoints at UCSD – one at Calit2 and one at IGPP SIO. Group Transport Protocol (GTP), is used to efficiently send multi-gigabyte 3D scene files from the various storage sites for interactive visualization on tiled displays at the visualization sites.

Visualization of various geophysical datasets are planned for this demonstration. For example, Dr. Bridget Smith will present a history of earthquake activity in California for the last 100 years. She will use the 55 tile display at Calit2 to visualize velocity, displacement and stress measurements for major earthquakes using the ‘Fledermaus’ software. Fledermaus allows scientists to import geophysical datasets and export a ‘scene’ file that can be interactively viewed. Each tile of the 100 megapixel wall will display one such scene file, making it possible to look at say, displacement along the z axis for 50 years of seismic activity in California at the same time. At the same time, Dr. Debi Kilb will be at IGPP looking at the same visualization files on a 50 megapixel Apple tiled display and videoconferencing with Bridget using Polycoms.

Besides a history of earthquakes, we plan to display interactive visualizations of land and ocean bathymetry, global seismicity and datasets related to natural disasters such as wildfires and tsunamis.

These 3d scene files will be aggressively fetched using GTP from multiple storage locations within the USA (Starlight/EVL at Chicago, OptIPuter Storage Cluster at JSOE, UCSD) and outside (Amsterdam).