Sharing, streaming of scientific visualisations set for boost

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, has been awarded a three-year, $810,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a resource that lets researchers seamlessly share and stream scientific visualisations on a variety of platforms, including mobile devices.

The new project, named SEED for 'swiftly encode, explore, disseminate,' provides an essential yet missing component in computational research and the current high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure.

''We will be creating a cyberinfrastructure to fill these gaps by using a combination of hardware and software that will enable rapid sharing, exploration, video encoding, and dissemination of visualization content on the Web directly from HPC resources,'' said Amit Chourasia, a senior visualisation scientist at SDSC and principal investigator for the project.

Computational simulations have become an indispensable tool for researchers in a wide variety of areas, from neurosurgical planning to better predicting the impact of earthquakes.

As these simulations increase in complexity, resolution and duration, visualisation of their results has become important in rapid assessment of the data. In addition, collaborative analysis of simulation and observational data by multiple researchers or groups is emerging across myriad research communities.

The result of many visualisation processes is a set of image sequences, which can be encoded as a movie and distributed within and beyond the research groups doing the simulations. However, the encoding process of such movies is a computationally intensive, cumbersome and complicated process as well as one that each research group must undertake.