Content about Images

Video of the week - Telejamming over the net

Head down, brow furrowed in concentration, Scott Deal plies his trade in the Supercomputing 2009 exhibition hall. As Deal rattles, rumbles, brushes, and bangs an arc of percussion instruments, band member Jordan Munson creates the tonal elements of the music – from 2200 miles away.

Deal is a professor of music at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), and Director of the Donald Tavel Arts and Technology Research Center. He is also a member of the band called “Big Robot.” (Michael Drews, the third member of the trio, was only present for the first half of the performance, and does not appear in the video of the week).

Despite the distance – Deal is in Portland, Oregon, while his bandmates are in Indianapolis, Indiana – the performance has a certain immediacy. The Portland audience can watch Munson on a large video screen behind Deal, thanks to ConferenceX

I see crime scenes

IC-CRIME’s laser scanner technology will allow investigators to accurately record room and object dimensions, as well as the placement of every piece of evidence in a crime scene.Image courtesy NCSU

Fighting crime with science isn’t as simple as popular TV shows like CSI would have you believe. But those shows get one thing right: science and technology have a tremendous potential for changing the way crime is investigated.
Today, investigators record crime scenes using sketches and photographs. Bullet trajectories are determined using lasers or even lengths of string. “They take a microsnapshot,” said Mitzi Montoya, a North Carolina State University researcher who specializes in knowledge and virtual team management. “You don’t really know what’s relevant in a crime scene, and you can’t go back and create it, because once it’s cleaned it’s gone forever.”
That could change if the IC-CRIME (Interdiscip

Tweet of the week – Midnight in the LHC control room

The LHC control room at CERN, just before midnight on Friday, 20 November, 2009. Photo courtesy CERN

This week, we honor . . .  the Twitter feed at CERN, which allowed us to follow the progress of the Large Hadron Collider restart from the comfort of home on an extremely dark and foggy evening last Friday, when the beam was captured at close to midnight, Geneva time. (Apparently, we weren’t the only ones paying attention to this event; the LHC “tweets” were one of the top five most popular items in Twitter-land.)
You could sense the building excitement, as the posts came in more and more frequently.  See the sequence below. (The time stamps are approximate.)
2 hours ago“Just one sector to go now!”2 hours ago“We have completed the ring!”1.5 hours ago“We will start injecting the anticlockwise beam in the second ring and then go step–by–step again. New photos w

Image of the week - Monumental modeling

Despite the monumental nature of the world’s heritage sites, they are quite vulnerable to the vicissitudes of their environment. Wind and water erosion wear them down, destroying historic features we may never be able to recapture.
To understand how the winds are changing the shape of the monuments on the Giza Plateau in Egypt, Ashraf Hussein and Hisham El-Shishiny created a three dimensional model of the region. Then they simulated the flow of the wind across the Giza Plateau to see where the wind pressure and friction is greatest.
This simulation was unusual because it had to handle large differences in scale among the various monuments on the Giza Plateau. To complicate matters, within the lower atmosphere the wind field must be resolved on very fine scales to achieve a high level of accuracy, said El-Shishiny.
To complicate matters, the problem size was much greater than the available computational resources. Ultimately, they ran the simulations on a c

Videos of the week - Cloud computing video contest

The term cloud computing is on everyone's lips. But what, exactly, does it mean?
To help clear up the cloud confusion, cloud solution provider Appirio is offering a meaty cash prize to the best video that can both entertain and explain cloud computing in under two minutes. The grand prize for the top video is $3000 US; the first runner up will receive $1000 US, and four honorable mentions will each get $250 US.
One contestant named Kyle Roche has already broken the two-minute limit with his DataCenter Super Heroes two-part series. In spite of the fact that each episode is five minutes long, the narrative structure and pithy humor make these videos stand out from the crowd of contestants.
Here's some of our favorite entries:

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Video of the week - BEN goes multi-touch

The Breakable Experimental Network – or BEN for short – is one of several projects that fall under the umbrella of the National Science Foundation’s Global Environment for Network Innovations initiative.
BEN is a collaboration between the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), Infinera, and Duke University. So it should come as no surprise that their team has done some work on pairing BEN with RENCI’s multi-touch interface technology.
The interface between multi-touch and BEN was developed independently by RENCI. “If we find the funding to develop it further it is meant to become an option primarily for interactive network management,” said Ilia Baldine, manager of the Network Research and Innovation Group at RENCI. “This year our focus is on usability improvements of the software so that BEN can be opened up to the experimenter community by this time next year,”

Watch this video to learn a little more abou

Virtualizing Rome in a day

A screenshot of the 3-D model of Rome's Colosseum, generated using several thousand Flickr photos. The black points surrounding the Coliseum indicate the vantage points from which photographs were taken. Image courtesy Build Rome in a Day project

Researchers at the University of Washington generated a 3-D model of Rome’s greatest landmarks in a day — and they did it by standing on the shoulders of Flickr users.
The researchers applied their algorithms to 150,000 Flickr images of Rome. It took a computer cluster containing 496 cores 13 hours to match common points in the images, sorting them into groups based on the landmark depicted. Another eight hours of computation time, and they had 3-D models of landmarks such as the Colosseum, St. Peter's Basilica, Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon.
The Building Rome in a Day project, which is still in progress, aims to build a parallel distributed system that can use Flickr photographs to reconstruct

Nanoporous materials for green technology

Pictured here, a metal-organic framework with pores of approximately 1.4 nanometer in diameter.  Image courtesy of David Dubbeldam.

A new class of materials with nano-scale pores could help to improve hydrogen fuel cells or reduce auto emissions.
Using a variety of TeraGrid resources, researchers at Northwestern University and Kansas State University were able to model and evaluate metal-organic frameworks to see how these materials will perform under specific circumstances. They found that metal-organic frameworks act much like sponges, soaking up hydrogen gas and storing it in their nano-sized pores. In fact, these metal-organic frameworks are capable of soaking up far more hydrogen gas than could normally occupy the same amount of space.
To learn more about this research and its further applications, visit the research group’s website.

Video of the Week - Preventing bird strikes

The Bird Avoidance Model could help to cut down on collisions between birds and planes at busy airports. Video and image courtesy Virtual Laboratory for e-Science. Click on the above and go to section that begins at 2 mins 45 seconds.

Encounters between birds and planes have the potential to be disastrous — just ask Chesley Sullenberger, pilot of the US Airways flight that just barely managed to land on New York City’s Hudson River after colliding with a flock of geese on 15 January.
Such “bird strikes” are a continuing problem, with about 4,000 of them occurring in the United States alone in a single year, says the Federal Aviation Authority.
The FAA and others would like to be able to forecast when and where dangerous  concentrations of birds will form — similar to meteorologists predicting the weather.
Researchers at the Virtual Laboratory for e-Science (vl-e), The Net

Image of the Week - Watch a tornado

Large-Eddy simulation of a tornado's interaction with the surface. Image courtesy Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

Just what does the interior of a tornado look like as it swirls over the land?
To find out, researchers W.S. Lewellen, D.C. Lewellen and Aytekin Gel of West Virginia University made high resolution, fully 3-D simulations in an attempt to answer questions about the character of the turbulent eddies in this unique flow.
The following animated clip, made by Gel in close cooperation with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s (PSC) Scientific-Visualization Group, uses particle advection to represent wind direction and isosurfaces to show pressure inside a 400 m x 400 m x 400 m domain from a simulation involving approximately 100 hours of a Cray C90 supercomputer at PSC.
As a resource provider in TeraGrid, a National Science Foundation program of coordinated cyberinfrastructure for education and research, PSC works with its T

Image of the week - Red, green and blue for a new view

NGC 253 was discovered in 1783 by astronomer Caroline Herschel and is the brightest member in the Sculptor group of galaxies. This is the nearest such galaxy collection to the so-called Local Group, which includes our own Milky Way. (Click on image to enlarge.) Created with IRSA On-Demand Image Mosaic Service and Montage v3.0

By combining different images taken on different instruments and at different wavelengths, grid-enabled Montage software can create all-new views of the stars — including NGC 253, also known as the “Silver Dollar Galaxy.”
At visible wavelengths, NGC 253 appears as a very dusty spiral galaxy viewed almost edge-on to our line of sight. The blue channel of this three-color image represents the visible view using B-band images from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. At these wavelengths it is very difficult to see what the structure of the galaxy’s center looks like. Radiation at longer wavelength

Image of the week - A VAPOR-ous view

Passage of a cold front on 18 February 2008 over Georgia. The convergence of moisture ( colored flow lines with red corresponding to high moisture content and green color with low moisture content) along the front is presented using three dimensional vorticity. Image courtesy Thara Prabhakaran, University of Georgia.

The image at right shows a  3D image of a cold front, created with software from VAPOR,  the Visualization and Analysis Platform for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Solar Researchers.VAPOR provides:

A visual data discovery environment tailored towards the specialized needs of the geosciences CFD community
A desktop solution capable of handling terascale size data sets
Advanced interactive 3D visualization tightly coupled with quantitative data analysis
Support for multi-variate, time-varying data
Close coupling with powerful interpretive data language,\.
Support for 3D visualization of datasets.

VAPOR runs on most