Content about Images

Feature - The 1970s in the 21st century: synthesized music returns (via parallel processing)

This Arp 2500 analog modular synthesizer from 1971 had hundreds of inputs and outputs for control of the synthesis processes. Image courtesy of discretesynthesizers.com.

Curtis Roads is a professor, vice chair, and graduate advisor in media arts and technology, with a joint appointment in music at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He also was the editor of the Computer Music Journal (published by MIT Press), and co-founded the International Computer Music Association. He is often a featured speaker at conferences such as Supercomputing. 
 
Music is an interactive, concurrent process. A note or a chord sounds, then is replaced, gradually or sharply, softly or powerfully, by the next one. For electronically produced or enhanced music, real-time technical advances are critical to continued progress and exploration. In the 1970s, I fondly remember learning my first parallel

Video of the week - NASA goes to the clouds

Lately, the media has been flooded with stories about NASA and cloud computing.
Some have been about how the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA is using Amazon's cloud services to plan the Mars Rover's daily activities.
More, however, have been about the impending open source release of NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform.
That’s why we decided to feature two videos about Nebula as our videos of the week. Watch them to learn more about Nebula and computing at NASA.
—Miriam Boon, iSGTW

Image of the Week - Google Street View lands in Antarctica

The above picture is of Half Moon Island in the South Shetlands. You can see a 360 degree panoramic view of the island by pressing the arrows in the top-left hand corner of the picture. It has a certain ‘cool’ factor in more ways than one, don’t you think?
Original courtesy Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering, for Google Earth and Maps.

The ubiquity of Google knows no bounds. Their Street View service, first introduced in 2007, with its 360-degree panoramic street-level images has now captured views of our planet’s most southern-most continent – Antarctica.
Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering for Google Earth and Maps, took the Street View images or ‘vacation photos’ while travelling to Antarctica on a cruise ship. More information about his trip can be found here.

Image of the Week - Why scientific computing does not compute

Source: G. Wilson. With permission of Nature Publishing Group.

This image appeared in a recent Nature News article entitled “Computational news: ...Error ...why scientific programming does not compute.”
The article presents a well-supported perspective on what is wrong with the way scientific software is created. This image presents statistics from a survey of nearly 2000 researchers in which they answered questions about their software development activities and knowledge.
You can see the original article here.
—Miriam Boon, iSGTW

Image of the week - A better supernova model

This image shows a 3D time series of the development and expansion of the supernova shock. Time is increasing as you move from left to right. The purple surface is an isocontour of entropy while the blue/green surface is an isocontour of density.
Image by Jason Nordhaus and Adam Burrows, Princeton University. Image and caption courtesy of NERSC.

When large stars die out and collapse, they explode, creating a supernova. But when scientists attempted to simulate this process, they got a “fizzle” instead of a “bang.” Until now, scientists simply assumed that there is something fundamental about the physics of supernovae that we didn't understand.
Now scientists may have cracked the problem by using a new approach to create computer simulations of supernovae.
“The new simulations are based on the idea that the collapsing star itself is not sphere-like, but distinctly asymmetrical and affected by a host of inst

Video of the Week - A slice of the Citizen Cyberscience Summit

GridCast at CCS

Francois Grey
Catherine Gater
Becky Parker
Mark McAndrew
Hanny Van Arkel
Peter Amoako Yirenkyi

Earlier this month, citizens and scientists gathered for the London Citizen Cyberscience Summit. The event included content on a wide variety of topics, and the e-ScienceCast team (formerly known as GridCast) was there to see the action unfold. Watch interviews with a variety of attendees in this week's videos of the week.

Image of the Week - Supercomputing between the lines

Left: This is just one of many images you’ll find inside the Supercomputing Coloring Book. Image courtesy of NCSA.Right: According to the Supercomputing Coloring Book, researchers use supercomputers to simulate the folding and unfolding of proteins — like this tryptophan cage protein — in an effort to understand how folding errors can cause diseases. Image copyright Carlos Simmerling, 2006.

Supercomputers are far from child’s toys, but that doesn’t mean children can't appreciate them.That's just one of many reasons why the National Center for Supercomputing Applications put together their Supercomputing Coloring Book.“I think it does a few things well,” said Bill Bell, division director of public affairs at NCSA. “It grabs your attention. It communicates that just because the concepts are complicated doesn’t mean they have to be intimidating. And it introduces people to someth

Video of the Week - NoHardware.com destroys server huggers' equipment

ul.video2 {
display:block;
text-decoration:none;
list-style-type:none;
padding:0; margin:0;
background-color:#5d5d5d;
}

ul.video2 li a {
padding-left: 5px;
line-height:20px;
color:#fbf039;
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:11px; font-weight:800;
display:block;
list-style:none;
border-bottom:solid 1px #CCCCCC;
text-decoration:none;
}

ul.video2 li a:hover {
background-color: #eaeaea;
color:#000000;
}

.active {
color:#000 !important;
background-color: #eaeaea;
}

.box {
width:428px;
/*height:425px; */
float:left;
}

.video {
width:428px;
height:350px;
float:left;
background-color:#000000;
}

/*.videoCaption {
width:422px;
height:69px;
float:left;
background-color:#eaeaea; font-size:10px; font-weight:400;
padding:3px;
}*/

#videoTitle {
width:600px;
height:20px;
background-color:#2d33ad;
fo

Relativistic reference frames speed simulations

This simulation was conducted on Franklin at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, NERSC, at Berkeley Lab. Image courtesy of Mori et. al.

Even on a supercomputer, simulating the next generation of laser-plasma accelerators would take months. Luckily, by solving an old problem to create a new way to model these accelerators, an international group of researchers has cut the computation time by a factor of at least 100.
Laser-plasma accelerators shoot powerful laser pulses into a cloud of plasma, creating a wave that electrons can "surf" to accelerate more rapidly than in traditional accelerators. Normally, computer models consider this problem from the experimenter's reference frame, in which the plasma is more or less stationary and the laser is traveling at the speed of light.
This team, jointly led by Warren Mori at the University of California at Los Angeles and Luis Silva at the Instituto Superior Tecnico in

Image of the Week - Mapping Science

This image, entitled Internet Splat Map, was produced in 2009 by William Cheswick and Ben Worthen. It was produced by sending a large number of IP packets out randomly across the network. Each packet is designed to self-destruct after a set amount of time; when it does, the packet failure notice it returns describes the path it took. The visualization of the resulting data was created using place and route software from the semiconductor industry.
These maps can be used to find security gaps or monitor the networks during wartime bombing raids.
BBN (early ARPANET) is the random scatter of green in the middle. Sprint is the organized star topology in purple near the top. AOL is a gray disconnected island in the lower center. There is little correlation between this network connectivity graph and physical geography, except for a clustering of Pacific Rim connectivity. To see a similar map with labels, download the map PDF here.
Image courtesy of William Ch

Image of the Week - Airbending with GPUs

Zade Rosenthal/Industrial Light & Magic Nicola Peltz plays Katara in the Paramount Pictures/Nickelodeon Movies adventure, “The Last Airbender.” Copyright (C) 2010 Paramount Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

What do whirling clouds, smoke, and ocean mist have in common with fire? They were all simulated using Plume, Industrial Light & Magic’s proprietary fluid simulation system.
The artistic process is marked by repeated review and revision. But rendering graphics takes time, and if you have to wait hours to review and revise your work, it’s hard to achieve artistic excellence.
To speed things up, ILM sped their computations up with GPUs. The NVIDIA press release states:

Central to achieving many of these sequences was the use of a tool created by ILM called Plume. Plume is both a fluid simulation system and a GPU-based renderer that utilizes the NVIDIA® CUDA™ parallel computing architectu