• Complete list of winners from SciDAC’s Visualization Night
• Adobe closes shop for a week
• nShatter uses CUDA for Shatter Simulations

Red Bull Technology uses HPC & FieldView in Formula 1

Red Bull Technology’s Formula 1 car just brought home a 1-2 finish at the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai in April, and another 1-2 finish at Silverstone in June. How did they do it? Well, FieldView from Intelligent Light gave them insight into the CFD models used to simulate their cars, helping them edge out the competition.

Learning from high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and rapidly turning the results into design decisions is the rule at Red Bull Technology. With several thousand cores of high performance computing (HPC) capacity churning out simulation results 24 hours a day, converting the solution data into key metrics, launching comparative studies, and understanding important flow phenomena requires robust, efficient tools. Red Bull Technology relies on FieldView(TM) CFD post-processing software from Intelligent Light to turn simulation data into actionable information in this highly productive CFD workflow.

John Carmack talks about the iPhone 3GS Hardware

John Carmack of id software, now part of Bethesda, sits down with Toms Hardware to talk about the iPhone 3GS and what can be done with the new OpenGLES2.0 hardware, and he’s excited about the possibility.

In fact, he proclaims, “now I am very excited about what I can do from a hardware and graphics standpoint with the 3GS. With vertex fragment shaders and OpenGL 2.0, I’m pretty convinced that I can actually run the MegaTexture id Tech 5 content creation pipeline on there. And I’m not sure what game I want to do that with yet, but the combination of seeing people download 700mb files of Myst on there, and the new capabilities, I could do some mind-blowingly cool stuff on there.”

id has already released a new Doom game for the iPhone, and claims they are working on a new iPhone Doom Trilogy.

Gaikai demos remote-based Game Rendering

Previously mentioned Gaikai has just released a video demonstration showing how it works, and how well. The blog post accompanying the video has some interesting details:

(1) No installing anything. (I’m running regular Windows Vista, with the latest Firefox and Flash is installed.)

(2) This is a low-spec server, it’s a very custom configuration, fully virtualized. Why? To keep the costs to an absolute minimum. We had 7 Call of Duty games running on our E3 demo server recently.

(3) Data travel distance is around 800 miles (round trip) on this demo as that’s where the server is. I get a 21 millisecond ping on that route. My final delay will be 10 milliseconds as I just added a server in Irvine California yesterday, but it’s not added to our grid yet. (So this demo is twice the delay I personally would get, the good news is I don’t notice it anyway.)

(4) This server is not hosted by a Tier 1 provider, just a regular Data Center in Freemont California. Also, I’m not cheating and using fiber connections for our demos. This is a home cable connection in a home.

(7) Our bandwidth is mostly sub 1 megabit across all games. (Works with Wifi, works on netbooks with no 3D card etc.)

Check out the video after the break. It looks like they might really have something here. The demo shows Spore (PC version), Mario Kart 64 (in an Emulator), and several others all running within FireFox.

ILM built the Transformers to withstand IMAX scrutiny

ILM built the models in the new Transformers movie to withstand scrutiny in IMAX theaters. The process, with all of the gory details, is cataloged over at StudioDaily.

There’s a sequence in DreamWorks/Paramounts’ Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in which the Devastator, a gigantic Decepticon robot, scales an Egyptian pyramid as easily as a gorilla climbing a tree and rips off the top. With over 52,632 parts and nearly 12 million polygons, the robot is the biggest model Industrial Light & Magic has built in its 30 years of model-making. And they built the bot for IMAX shots.

The Molecule offers advice on working with large 3D Models & Simulations

The Molecule has a new blog post up talking about the problems they experienced doing the 3D Modeling and simulation work for “The Detonators” on Discovery Channel. Each of the 20 simulations took multiple layers (five to eight) plus 2D overlays, and they found alot of interesting tricks along the way.

Additionally, it is important to note that the layers were not all rendered at the same resolution–occlusion and shadow passes were amongst the slowest, and rendering them at half- or quarter-resolution would allow us to decrease the render time by a factor of 4 or 16, with no noticeable difference in final image quality.

NASA & Japan release the world’s most complete Topographic Map

Combining 1.3million individual stereo-pair images collected by the Japanese Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) aboard Terra NASA & Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), the most complete digital elevation map ever made was constructed.

“This is the most complete, consistent global digital elevation data yet made available to the world,” said Woody Turner, ASTER program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This unique global set of data will serve users and researchers from a wide array of disciplines that need elevation and terrain information.”

Previously the best maps only covered 80% of the Earth’s landmass. You can see visualizations of the data at the here, and download the model here.

In order to help developers and engineers meet the challenges posed by parallel programming, Sun Microsystems is offering a series of seminars called “An Introduction to Parallel Programming” discussing parallel programming as a fundamental of application development. In this episode, Sun’s Ruud van der Pas kicks things off with a presentation on performance tuning.

You can watch the video here.

Applying ANSYS software to structural simulation, Alinghi’s goal is to build the lightest, strongest boat possible. The team will use ANSYS fluid dynamics simulation primarily on the hulls, appendages, sails and masts. “With the sheer size and speed of the class of yacht we’re designing, the loads have become enormous. We need to have confidence in our simulations, because if something breaks people may be hurt. We also need our shapes to be optimal for fluid drag and lift purposes, so while the structural engineers want everything to be shaped like an I-beam for optimal structural properties, the fluids people want everything to be streamlined and skinny. Somewhere in the middle is the optimum, and this is where the ANSYS software is so useful. Doing full simulation using the same family of codes within the ANSYS Workbench environment really makes our life easier,” Bungener added.

In an upcoming episode of the Green HPC podcast series I interview Bill Kramer about Blue Waters and the steps that NCSA is taking to be proactive in manging — and reducing — energy use by that machine.

OCF plc, the UK’s premier HPC system integrator, demonstrates its ongoing commitment to providing customers with deep HPC technical skills, expertise and knowledge with the appointments of long-term employees Barry Evans, Technical Manager and Russell Slack, Engineering Manager to its Board of Directors.

…Working for OCF since 2002, Barry is Technical Manager responsible for pre-sales, solution architecture and technical strategy recommendations for OCF’s clients.  With an extensive background in systems engineering and systems management, Barry previously held positions with West Corporation, the U.S. Department of Defense and Utell International in the United States.

Russell is Engineering Manager working for OCF plc since 2002 and with its predecessor firm since December 1995.  Responsible for a team of six engineers; Russell has worked his way up from Trainee Engineer, UNIX System Engineer and Senior Engineer with OCF plc.  Russell oversees every part of customers’ post-sales installations which includes: coordinating delivery of customers’ orders to OCF for pre-installation quality testing purposes; investigating the most effective way of implementing solutions; coordinating the delivery and managing the installation of solutions at customers’ sites and the creation and agreement of ‘Statements of Work’ to ensure that the scope of work is clearly understood by all parties.

PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, a consortium of the 16 leading supercomputing centers in Europe, will arrange a seminar for potential industry users in Toulouse, France, on 7.-8. September 2009. The seminar will focus on industrial needs and expectations of the future European High Performance Computing (HPC) Infrastructure.

Close to 150 invited participants, especially decision makers are expected to attend the event including representatives from aerospace, car manufacturing, energy, chemicals, drug design and medical industry, metal industry, bioinformatics, telecommunication companies, finance, insurance, as well as HPC vendors, scientific software developers and service companies, and EC representatives.
During the seminar participants will receive first hand information about the planned PRACE research infrastructure, services and usage.

More info at the seminar web site.

We are researching the ability to process data from a huge number of sources, so this project is using stream computing and the Blue Gene supercomputer,” says Morris. “We are able to get a 21x speed-up than any other system. The messages and sensors in the financial systems are increasing at more than 50 per cent each year – faster than doubling every two years – so something new is needed to analyse this data.”

“The goal of any automated trading system is to reduce the time between the receipt of market data messages and the decision, achieving a very low latency while processing extreme amounts of data,” adds Nagui Halim, chief scientist of the Stream Computing Project at IBM.

This is horribly interesting stuff.  There are nine other projects listed in the article.  They range from Hudson River data, electric cars and cocoa [yup, chocolate].  Read the full article here.

Our team is developing Maine’s first scientific grid portal that will execute climate-change models and provide high-resolution visualizations of output data in real time for use by researchers as well as students and educators in the state’s public school system. [Phillip M. Dickens, Ph.D.]

They’ve already planned to expand the scientific capability of their grid by working on a partnership with the Jackson Laboratory, a leading genetics research center.

Researchers at Jackson Laboratory will be able to upload data to University of Maine systems for processing, and the supercomputers will then compute the models and send back the visual renderings of the lab’s data — a true collaboration in solving large problems and a first for the state of Maine. This technology makes it possible to solve problems that are too large to execute at either facility alone by distributing the task across both the University of Maine system and the Jackson Lab cluster so that they can execute the task concurrently.

Dr. Dickens and the University of Maine have great plans and high aspirations for their newly formed grid project.  To read more about it, check out the full article here.

.: The cluster of 12 Sun Blade X6275 server modules was 4.7x faster than 256 processor configuration of the IBM BlueGene/L

.: The cluster of 12 Sun Blade X6275 server modules exhibited excellent scalability for NAMD molecular dynamics simulation, up to 10.4x speedup for 12 blades relative to 1 blade

.: For largest molecule considered, the cluster of 12 Sun Blade X6275 server modules achieved a throughput of 0.094 seconds per simulation step

The systems consisted of two Intel Nehalem’s of the 2.93GHz flavor nad 24GB of memory each.  The software config consisted of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 [kernel 2.6.16.60-0.31_lustre.1.8.0.1-sm], Scali MPI 5.6.6 and GNU compilers [ gcc 4.1.2 (1/15/2007), gfortran 4.1.2 (1/15/2007)].  They go into a fair amount of detail on which benchmarks were run and how.

See the full writeup here.