Virginia Tech faculty Nathan Hall and Nicholas Polys presented strategies, technologies, and examples of durable 3D data at the Library of Congress' Born to be 3D event. The Twitter stream is here: https://twitter.com/hashtag/b2b3d
Yearly Archives: 2018
ARC Goes Deep at SIGGRAPH 2018
ARC Director of Visual Computing, Nicholas Polys, was busy this year at THE 45TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION ON COMPUTER GRAPHICS AND INTERACTIVE TECHNIQUES (SIGGRAPH 2018)...
The VT Center for HCI posted this NEWS story and the international Web3D Consortium posted all of Dr. Polys' presentations HERE,
including:
- Immersive Visualisation for Research, Science and Art
- Cartographic Visualization (Carto) BoF
- Scaling Up 3D Medical Applications for People Everywhere
- WebVR Evolution for a Larger Web
- Design Printing and Scanning: Web3D Makers Making More!
Broader Impact Videos from Spring 2018
We have put up a channel in Vimeo that showcases the Broader Impacts of our HPC and Visualization work :
PEARC 2018
VT Biochemistry had a strong showing, presenting their results on using immersive visualization in VT's Visionarium Hypercube to engage and teach students (paper & presentation here).
The Technical Paper was presented and awarded Best Student Paper!
Dr. Srijith Rajamohan (srijithr@vt.edu) presented a workshop on ‘Introduction to Machine Learning with TensorFlow and Keras’. The purpose of this workshop was to provide a formal introduction to the mathematical concepts underlying Machine Learning. This was augmented by hands-on examples in the Machine Learning framework TensorFlow and the Deep Learning framework Keras. The slides for this workshop can be found at https://srijithr.gitlab.io/pos
Alana Romanella (aromanel@vt.edu) served on the executive committee as Diversity and Workforce Development Chair and Chair Emeritus for the Student Program. She focused on promoting inclusivity through increasing individual diversity awareness skills and effective organizational systems that allowed for a more diverse conference.
Interested in joining us next year?
PEARC19, will be located in Chicago from July 28 – August 1, 2019, and will explore the current practice and experience in advanced research computing including modeling, simulation, and data-intensive computing. A primary focus next year will be on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence which are proving to be disruptive technologies in a diverse range of scientific fields from materials science to medicine. https://www.pearc19.pearc.org/
New ARC Cluster : Huckleberry
ARC released a new cluster named Huckleberry in late 2017. The Huckleberry system, accessed at huckleberry1.arc.vt.edu, was installed with deep learning applications in mind. To this end, it consists of 14 IBM “Minsky” S822LC nodes and NVIDIA's proprietary NVLink interconnect network. This system enables highly parallel and highly distributed workloads. IBM unveiled its deep learning AI toolkit called PowerAI alongside the launch of Minsky nodes that leverage CPUs linked to Power CPUs with NVLink making it possible to have high speed high performance computing. PowerAI is available under /opt/DL in Huckleberry.
Each compute node on Huckleberry (i.e. IBM “Minsky” nodes) consists of :
- Two IBM Power8 with 10 cores, 8 threads per core and memory bandwidth 115gb/s per socket
- Four NVIDIA P100 GPUs advertised to have 21 teraFLOPS of 16-bit floating-point performance ideal for deep learning applications deliver high performance, massive parallelism
- NVIDIA's NVLink technology which provides high bandwidth data transfers between CPUs and GPUs; an improvement over PCI-Express
- Mellanox EDR Infiniband (100 GB/s) interconnect used to connect compute nodes
The PowerAI toolkit contains Caffe, TensorFlow etc. which are optimized for the Power servers. IBM provides support for it as well.
While the rest of the clusters make use of the PBS batch systems, Huckleberry makes use of the Slurm batch system using the command sbatch.
Individuals may request a Huckleberry account. Instructors can get set up class accounts for Huckleberry as well.
A Directory of ARC Software Examples
From any ARC login node, you can explore how to use ARC software by checking the directory /opt/examples
Details on the examples directory are in
https://198.82.212.30/userguide/examples/
Treat Fortran “real” variables as double precision
The gfortran, ifort, and pgf90 compilers can be instructed that variables declared as "real" should actually be stored and handled as double precision quantities. Details are at https://198.82.212.30/userguide/fortran_realsize/
Winged Insect – Visual Communications Design
The “Wing It” exhibit (both actual and virtual) just won a 2018 SEGD Global Design Merit award!!
The Winged Insect Exhibition is designed by students in Environmental Design and New Media course. Students created multiple virtual versions of The Winged Insects exhibition before holding the exhibition in the actual space. The 3D designs were developed with tools like Sketchup, Maya, and Blender to produce ISO-IEC standard X3D. The X3D version of the Exhibition allows for multi-stakeholder and multi-platform design presentations through W
Through the X3D version of Winged Insects exhibition in the Hyper Cube students experienced multiple prototypes and changed their design in the virtual space. This is the final design of The Winged Insects exhibition in the Cowgill Hall at Virginia Tech.
Annual Research Computing “Day”: April 9 – 10, 2018
Click to learn more about the events on April 9-10th, 2018 at Torg. 1100 and the Inn at Virginia Tech.
High Performance Visualization Update
We have posted a new video of immersive visualization in the Visionarium! Here is a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) dataset rendered in real time in the HyperCube:
Computational Fluid Dynamics: Bat Flight from Visionarium on Vimeo.
(This work was supported in part by NSF CBET Grant # 1510797 (Fluid Dynamics)
The Visionarium Lab (Torgersen Hall 3050) is open for drop-in hours M W F 12:00-1:00 pm.
