Futures Laboratory

This visualization of the Universe as it condenses around fluctuations in the density of dark and ordinary matter is a result from a collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory and the San Diego Supercomputer Center/University of California, San Diego.  In a demonstration at SC09  visualizations of a 4096^3 data volume was streamed from Eureka, the graphics cluster at Argonne, over ESnet, filling a 10Gb/s network link, to an OptiPortal in the SDSC booth on the exhibit floor.  The demonstration was part of an effort to establish end-to-end workflows that leverage high-performance computing and visualization resources, high-speed networks, and advanced displays spread across the country.

What am I looking at?

This simulation follows the growth of density perturbations in both gas and dark matter components in a volume 1 billion light years on a side beginning shortly after the Big Bang and evolved to half the present age of the universe. It calculates the gravitational clumping of intergalactic gas and dark matter modeled using a computational grid of 64 billion cells and 64 billion dark matter particles. The simulation uses a computational grid of 4096^3 cells and took over 4,000,000 CPU hours to complete.

The visualization shows the density value, whose range spans over 6 orders of magnitude. The animation of the evolution was made from 148 terabytes of data generated on Kraken at the National Institute for Computational Sciences and transferred to Argonne over ESnet. The rendering was performed on Eureka at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.

The software behind the visualization is vl3, a hardware-accelerated volume rendering library and application developed at the University of Chicago and Argonne.  It was recent developments in vl3 to enable the parallel streaming of visualizations from a rendering cluster to a remote tiled display driven by another cluster that made the SC09 demonstrations possible. Additionally, features currently in development will provide scientists located at the tiled display with remote interactive controls over the visualization.  During this effort many enhancements were also made to vl3’s animation generating capabilities, which facilitated the production of animations shown during the demonstration, and made available from the links below.

Acknowledgments

Science:

• Michael L. Norman, San Diego Supercomputer Center/University of California, San Diego
• Robert Harkness, San Diego Supercomputer Center/University of California, San Diego
• Pascal Paschos, San Diego Supercomputer Center/University of California, San Diego
• Rick Wagner, San Diego Supercomputer Center/University of California, San Diego

Visualization:

• Mark Hereld, Argonne National Laboratory
• Joseph A. Insley, Argonne National Laboratory
• Eric C. Olson, University of Chicago
• Michael E. Papka, Argonne National Laboratory

Additional Support:

• Eli Dart, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Kai Doerr, University of California, San Diego
• Brian Dunne, University of California, San Diego
• Susan Hicks, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Tom Hutton, San Diego Supercomputer Center
• Falko Kuester, University of California, San Diego
• Nathaniel Mendoza, National Institute for Computational Sciences
• Larry Smarr, University of California, San Diego
• Loren Jan Wilson, Argonne National Laboratory
• Linda Winkler, Argonne National Laboratory

The simulation was done as part of the 2009 TeraGrid award, “Projects in Astrophysical and Cosmological Structure Formation”, and used resources from the National Institute for Computational Sciences.

The visualization was produced in 2009 with support from TeraGrid, under National Science Foundation  Grant OCI-0504086, and used resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Download

The movie is available for download at several resolutions:

• 1920×1080 (649 MB)
• 852×480 (21 MB)
• 480×269 (14.2 MB)

For more information contact us at fl-info [at] mcs [dot] anl [dot] gov.

This visualization of the Universe as it condenses around fluctuations in the density of dark and ordinary matter is a result from a collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory and the San Diego Supercomputer Center/University of California, San Diego.  It is part of an effort to establish end-to-end workflows that leverage high-performance computing and visualization resources, high-speed networks, and advanced displays spread across the country.  These workflows include automatically creating visualizations from simulation data as it is generated, and enabling researchers to remotely view and control these visualizations on ultra high-resolution displays.

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UChicago/Argonne TeraGrid visualization gateway provides access to cutting edge volume rendering tool.

University of Chicago provides Web-based access to advanced visualization resources to undergraduate anatomy students.
The use of visualization as a teaching tool is not an entirely new concept at the University of Chicago. Jonathan Silverstein, associate director of the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory and associate professor of Surgery, Radiology, and The College of the University of Chicago has been using it to teach a human anatomy class in the undergraduate biology curriculum since the Spring Quarter of 2006. “It is the first complete anatomy course we are aware of which directly substitutes immersive virtual reality via stereo volume visualization of clinical radiological datasets for cadaver dissection,” explains Silverstein.
Computed tomography (CT) scanners produce hundreds to thousands of two-dimensional grayscale images per patient scan. An application called MedVolViz, developed by Silverstein’s team, can take this slice image data and reconstruct it into a relevant, three dimensional volume representing the patient’s anatomy. During class time a modest-sized cluster of computer graphics workstations is used to run this application, producing images from these data volumes. The underlying software used to build MedVolViz is a volume rendering library called vl3, developed at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. Continue reading…

Collaborative visualization session between LANL and ANL.

Using the Access Grid, we conducted a test of VPCScreenIX, software developed at ANL to support collaborative visualization. The test involved two climate scientists: Rob Jacob of ANL and Mat Maltrud of LANL. The test was successful in that the software ran and performed as expected, and was considered a success by the scientists involved. Rob said that, despite theirs being a media-intensive field involving images and movies and visualization software, they typically only use PowerPoint when discussing their work, maybe also using VNC. He said that the ability to collaboratively view and interact with their visualizations between all participating sites would be a valuable addition to how they conduct meetings, and that he would likely use it in the future.

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