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DOE Pulse
  • Number 321  |
  • September 27, 2010

SCiDAC visualizations bring science to the senses

Argonne and the University of Chicago's simulation of a Type 1a supernova combustion was the VizNight winner.

Argonne and the University of
Chicago's simulation of a
Type 1a supernova combustion
was the VizNight winner.

Expressed as raw data, a simulation performed on a supercomputer would appear as a formless sea of trillion-floating-operations-per-second calculations. When the visualization researchers do their work, however, the results are often as colorful and captivating as they are revealing.

Recently researchers from the computational science community gathered at the annual Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program (SciDAC) conference in Chattanooga, Tenn. SciDAC, a program under the Department of Energy's Office of Science, brings together the nation's top researchers to tackle challenging scientific problems by advancing computational science and developing the tool necessary to enable the use of high-performance computers of the day, as well as those envisioned in the next decade.

The SciDAC 2010 conference, hosted by DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, included a visualization competition in addition to four days of presentations, poster sessions and informal networking. Attendees brought their best scientific visualizations from simulations run on high-performance computers such as those located at the DOE Leadership Computing Facilities at the Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories and at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.

A clip, titled "Verification Study of Buoyancy-Driven Turbulent Nuclear Combustion for Three Different Physical Situations," a simulation of the combustion processes inside type 1a supernovae, was judged the conference favorite. The Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago Flash Center product can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NO6FSi1Lu0.

Other "Viz Night" winners included animations of merging galaxies, the interiors of fusion reactors, shattering projectiles and energy moving through a particle accelerator—all illustrating the range of sciences supported by the SciDAC program.

Here are some of the animations from the Viz Night top ten (some clips may take time to load):

A visualization of a binary galaxy cluster merger from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of Chicago placed second:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opP7ttCCC20

This visualization of "Convective Flow with Integral Surfaces" from the University of California Davis tied for third place: http://www.idav.ucdavis.edu/~garth/scidac10/video.mp4

An ORNL animation of the plasma inside the proposed ITER experimental fusion reactor came in fifth, and can be viewed here: http://users.nccs.gov/~d65/ITER/ITERfusion.html .

Another supernova simulation, "Type Ia Supernova: Turbulent Combustion on the Grandest Scale," from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California Santa Cruz, tied for sixth place: http://vis.lbl.gov/~hrchilds/vn_cac.mp4

The other sixth-place animation was from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of Colorado at Boulder, titled "Particle Bed Dynamics in a Fluidized Bed Reactor," which can be viewed here:  http://www.nrel.gov/pv/media/gruchalla.mp4 .

A "Hurricane Season" movie from Berkeley Lab tied for eighth place:
http://vis.lbl.gov/~prabhat/CCSM/Movies/hurricane-keynote.mov

Also placing eighth was "Hybrid Particle Finite Element Simulation of Impact, Perforation and Fragmentation," from the Department of Defense and the University of Texas, Austin. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPEey2QGcgw&feature=player_embedded

Finishing the top ten were the SLAC National Accelerator Facility and Sandia National Laboratories, with "Electromagnetic Wake in an Energy Recovery Linac Vacuum Chamber with Moving Simulation Window," seen here: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~schussma/VisNight10/  .

A pdf file listing all 10 winners can be found here: http://www.ornl.gov/ornlhome/news_items/pdf/scidac_visualization_night_winners.pdf

Submitted by DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory