In this video, Andreas Weigend, former Chief Data Scientist for Amazon.com and Peter Hirshberg, former head of Enterprise Marketing for Apple, discuss how Big Data can augment and improve decision making in the 21st century. The program was recorded on 8 November 2011 at the United Nations General Assembly.
Data is the new oil.”
The good news is that Data will not run out.
Some of the visualizations in this talk are simply amazing and I think the presenters do a great job of showing how Big Data is going change everything.
How do you mitigate an meteor? Our Video Sunday feature continues with this feature describing how LANL scientists used a Cray supercomputer to model effects of nuclear energy source on an Earth-threatening asteriod.
The newest supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Cielo, is currently working on classified nuclear weapons physics problems. However, it is sometimes used to do fascinating unclassified science when a computer model is so large that it can’t be run on a smaller platform. One of the unclassified models that ran recently on Cielo — a 1.35 petaflop/s machine built by Cray — was a model by Robert Weaver of Theoretical Design Applications Physics that looked at how 1 megaton nuclear energy source might effect the granular asteriod Itokawa as a way to prevent a potential asteriod impact with Earth.
The video was originally shown at SC11 in Seattle.
Just for fun, you might remember this scene from the Sci-Fi movie Armageddon. Yeah, they’re actually working on that. Now, what could be cooler than HPC?
In this video sequence by the Advanced Visualization Lab at NCSA, the dramatic formation of Hurricane Katrina is explored using advanced simulation techniques.
Scientists at the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications crunched terabytes of data gathered by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, to help create an amazing simulation. It creates an appropriate sense of foreboding for the impending disaster. Bulbous clouds gather moisture and deadly winds gain power as they travel across the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico, about to wreak havoc on New Orleans. The colored lines trace the storm’s 150 mph winds and represent air rising and falling: rapidly rising air is yellow, sinking air is blue. As time passes the sun, moon, and stars come into view and change positions.
In this video from SC11, Michael Norman (SDSC), Joseph Insley (ANL), and Rick Wagner (SDSC) describe a set of ground-breaking collaborative astrophysics simulations. Essentially, the visualizations depict the formation of the first galaxies, and what happened to the surrounding intergalactic gas when they lit up.
The light from early galaxies had a dramatic impact on the gasses filling the universe. This video highlights the spatial structure of the light’s effect, by comparing two simulations: one with a self-consistent radiation field (RHD), and one without (HD). The comparison shown is the relative difference of the density. The colors show whether the density is greater in radiative or non-radiative case.”
The simulation was run on 50,000 cores of the Jaguar supercomputer at ORNL and consumed over 20 million CPU hours to date. These are some stunning visualizations, folks. Be sure to check out the videos below in full HD resolution.
The comparison shown is the relative difference of the ionization fraction. The colors show whether the ionization fraction is greater in radiative or non-radiative case.
The comparison shown is the relative difference of the density. The colors show whether the density is greater in radiative or non-radiative case.
The comparison shown is the relative difference of the temperature. The colors show whether the temperature is greater in radiative or non-radiative case.
Credits:
Science: Robert Harkness, SDSC: Daniel R. Reynolds, Southern Methodist University: Michael Norman. SDSC: Rick Wagner, SDSC
Visualization: Mark Hereld, Argonne National Lab: Joeseph A. Insley, Argonne National Lab: Michael E. Papka, Argonne National Lab: Venkartram Vishwanath, Argonne National Lab
In this video, TACC’s Dr. Kelly Gaither presents: ”Interactively Visualizing Science at Scale” at SC11 in Seattle.
Visualization is one of the most important and commonly used methods of analyzing and interpreting digital assets. For many types of computational research, it is the only viable means of extracting information and developing understanding from data. However, non-visual data analysis techniques—statistical analysis, data mining, data reduction, etc.—also play integral roles in many areas of knowledge discovery.
In partnership with Dell, TACC has deployed Longhorn, the largest remote, interactive visualization and data analysis system in the world providing a comprehensive suite of large-scale visualization and data analysis services to the national open science community. Additionally, TACC has also deployed the largest tiled display in the world to date and a number of other large scale displays. This talk will provide an overview of Longhorn and TACC’s tiled displays and current science being enabled by the provision of these resource and associated services.
Dr. Gaither does a great job of explaining visualization in a way that even the layman can understand. Great stuff!
In this video, Dr. Paul Woodward from the University of Minnesota discusses how he ported gas dynamics codes to run on the Intel MIC architecture.
Back in 1997, I worked with Dr. Woodward on a Power Wall project with some of the other folks from the Laboratory for Science and Engineering. His visualizations of gas dynamics inside a star are simply amazing.
Our Video Sunday feature continues with this fascinating story from the University of Texas at Austin.
We all carry cell phones, yet we know little about how their electromagnetic fields affect our physiology. Enter AustinMan, a virtual human as guinea pig.
In 2009 the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded a five-year interdisciplinary study at The University of Texas at Austin to address the growing debate about the effects of microwave radiation. After two years, Electrical & Computer Engineering Assistant Professor Ali Yilmaz and his colleagues have built one of the highest-resolution electromagnetic human models to date: AustinMan. The model is helping to determine the effects of microwaves from wireless devices on the body.
Kelly Gaither is a major driving force in HPC visualization, development of large “superdisplays” comprised of large, tiled viz-walls in dealing with large data and parallel systems. As Director of Visualization at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), she currently hosts one of the world’s largest scientific visualization “SciVis” systems, and is helping to mature many programs and techniques now broadly recognized as another critical pillar in scientific method and discovery.
I’ve been to see the viz-walls at TACC, and I can tell you that they’re truly remarkable. This recognition for Kelly Gaither is well-deserved and it’s a great primer for the SC11 Scientific Visualization Showcase coming up next month in Seattle. Read the Full Story.
Our Video Sunday feature continues with this simulation that comes courtesy of FluiDyna GmbH. Shown is a BMW X3 fast flow simulation using LBultra within the RTT design suite DeltaGen and rapid review of aerodynamic features overlayed in a photo-realism display. Turn-around is 25X faster with GPU acceleration.
We want to show the SC audience how beautiful science can be and also highlight the important role that visualization plays in understanding scientific data,” said Kelly Gaither, director of visualization at the Texas Advanced Computing Center and chair of the SC11 Visualization Showcase.
The Scientific Visualization Showcase will be presented in a museum/art exhibit-style environment so that attendees can experience and enjoy the latest in science and engineering HPC results expressed through state-of-the-art visualization technologies. Read the Full Story.
In this video, Lucio Mayer describes how his team from Institute for Theoretical Physics in Zurich simulated the birth of the Milky Way in an 8-month computer run.
In this video, a supercomputing simulation depicts the physics involved in the formation of the Milky Way. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Zurich used over 8 months of supercomputing time to run the simulation, called “Eris,” which solves a long-standing problem that led some to question the prevailing cosmological model of our universe.o complete their analysis.
Previous efforts to form a massive disk galaxy like the Milky Way had failed, because the simulated galaxies ended up with huge central bulges compared to the size of the disk,” said Javiera Guedes, the postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich who authored the study.
In this video, IBM’s “Deep Thunder” simulation shows an 84-hour forecast for NYC starting from Aug. 24. At the end of the video you can see increase in clouds, some precipitation and the wind arrows lining up because of Hurricane Irene’s circulation.
Aaron Dubrow writes the visualization is often overlooked as a key tool for discovery, giving scientists a hands-on approach to virtual experiments:
Oftentimes, researchers don’t know what they’re looking for. They use visualization to do debugging or to do exploratory analysis of their simulation data. In those cases, visualization is really the only way to see,” said TACC’s Dr. Kelly Gaither. “It’s generally recognized in the vis community that interactivity is a crucial component of being able to do that analysis.”
In this video, IntegrityWare President David Gil describes the company’s Power SubD-Nurbs software that unites Sub-D modeling with CAD. Recorded at SIGGRAPH 2011 in Vancouver.
Aaron Dubrow writes the visualization is often overlooked as a key tool for discovery, giving scientists a hands-on approach to virtual experiments:
