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Home > News and Events
News and Events:
Fourth International Conference on Functional Imaging and Modeling of the Heart
The the Fourth International Conference on Functional Imaging and Modeling of the Heart is a biennial scientific event that aims to integrate the research and development efforts in the field of cardiovascular modeling and image analysis. The main goal is to encourage collaboration between scientists in signal and image processing, imaging, applied mathematics, biophysics, biomedical engineering and computer science, and experts in cardiology, radiology, biology and physiology.
The FIMH 2007 will be held in Salt Lake City on June 7-9th 2007 at the Spencer F. and Cleone P. Eccles Health Sciences Education Building, a magnificent location in an outstanding city. Salt Lake City is the state capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Utah. See:
FIMH 2007 Call for Papers
FIMH 2007 Website
Three SCI Developers among winners of Mozy.com's Code Deathmatch
Competing individually in the Mozy Code Deathmatch, SCI developers McKay Davis, Michael Callahan and Bryan Worthen represented three of the eight finalists and shared in the grand prize of $10,000. This unique coding contest was conducted with two online preliminary rounds and a final round held at Mozy.com's American Fork (Utah) office. The first round, lasting just an hour, required contestants to solve six small programming puzzles. The second round challenged the remaining contestants with four more difficult problems. The eight finalists then were invited to Mozy.com's office to compete head-to-head.
In the final round, the contestants were asked to write - in under ninety minutes - a small web server capable of handling 10,000 simultaneous connections. To assess the contestants' efforts, the judges then used a test client to connect and to establish a data connection with each server 10,000 times in a short period. Each server then had to sort the data and retrieve three specific pieces of the data. Although all finalists managed to develop a functioning server, none of their servers scaled well enough to meet the full scope of the challenge. After some debate, all agreed to declare the competition a tie and to split the prize money equally among the finalists.
"It was a bit different than the average programming competition. It looks like they not only wanted to judge our ability to solve a problem, but also to judge other things like our understanding of computer systems and our ability to figure things out we might not have learned before. I had a little bit of socket and thread programming experience going into the competition, which did help, but I ended up having to look up specifics, and I assume most of the rest did as well." - Bryan Worthen
"I thought the Mozy guys did a great job with their contest and we all had a good time. Here's hoping more such contests happen in the future! - Michael Callahan
Congratulations to McKay, Michael, and Bryan for this demonstration of SCI programming prowess!
SCI to Collaborate on Three New SciDAC Centers
 The VACET Center will develop visualization and data analysis tools designed to meet the needs of scientists. |
The Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies (VACET), includes SCI Institute faculty Chris Johnson (Center Co- PI with Wes Bethel from LBNL), Chuck Hansen, Steve Parker, Claudio Silva, Allen Sanderson and Xavier Tricoche. The center will focus on leveraging scientific visualization and analytics technology to increase scientific productivity and insight. It will be challenged with resolving one of the primary bottlenecks in contemporary science, making the massive amounts of data now available to scientists accessible and understandable. Advances in computational technology have resulted in an "information Big Bang," vastly increasing the amount of scientific data available, but also creating a significant challenge to reveal the structures, relationships, and anomalies hidden within the data. The VACET Center will respond to that challenge by adapting, extending, creating when necessary, and deploying visualization and data understanding technologies for the scientific community.
The center will involve collaborators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and UC Davis.
For more information about VACET, please see the announcement "Seeing the Unsee-able" on the SciDAC website.
The The Scientific Data Management Center for Enabling Technologies, will include SCI Institute faculty Steve Parker and Claudio Silva in a project that builds upon previous success in the development of advanced data management technologies. This project will improve upon their scientific data management framework to address the needs of petascale science. Their goal is to develop a more comprehensive, acquisition to final analysis, data management solution that can handle the increasing scale and complexity of scientific data. They will enhance and extend existing tools to allow for more interactivity and workflow management, better feature extraction, and improved parallelism and scalability.
For this project, the SCI Institute will join collaborators working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, North Carolina State University, Northwestern University and the University of California at San Diego.
The Center for Technology for Advanced Scientific Component Software (TASCS), will include SCI Institute faculty Steve Parker to build upon previous success in the development of Common Component Architecture (CCA), a set of standards for component development that allows disparate components to be composed together to build a running application. This extensible component-based software architecture facilitates software interoperability between components developed by different teams across different institutions. TASCS will extend CCA methodology in collaboration with several key application projects, through an interlinked series of activities, to develop powerful new capabilities.
The TASCS Center involves the SCI Institute with collaborators from Argonne National Laboratory, Binghamton University, Indiana University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Tech-X Corporation and the University of Maryland.
For more information about TASCS, please see the announcement "Plug and Play Supercomputing" on the SciDAC website.
SCI Gets a Sneak Preview of the Warnock Building Under Construction
SCI Grad Student Helps Solve Open Problem in Computational Geometry
SCI graduate student Jason F. Shepherd and coauthor Carlos D. Carbonera have published a solution to Problem #27 of The Open Problems Project's list of unresolved problems in computational geometry. The question is:
Can the interior of every simply connected polyhedron whose surface is meshed by an even number of quadrilaterals be partitioned into a hexahedral mesh compatible with the surface meshing?
The solution of Carbonera and Shepherd settles the practical aspects of the problem by demonstrating an explicit algorithm that extends a quadrilateral surface mesh to a hexahedral mesh where all the hexahedra have straight segment edges. This work did leave one aspect of the problem open. The authors did not resolve the question of achieving a hexahedral mesh with all planar faces. The collaborators are now working on a revision that should close this problem definitively.
C. D. Carbonera, J.F. Shepherd, "A Constructive Approach to Constrained Hexahedral Mesh Generation," Proceedings, 15th International Meshing Roundtable, Birmingham, AL, September 2006.
Dr. Sarang Joshi joins SCI Institute
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Dr. Joshi received his D.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests include Image Understanding, Computer Vision and Shape Analysis. He holds numerous patents in the area of image registration and has over 50 scholarly publications.
SCI Institute Software Used to Develop Revolutionary Artistic Process
Software Helps Scientists Delve into a New World
San Antonio, TX - In their day-to-day workings as physicians and scientists, Dr. Charles Keller and his associates couldn't help but recognize the beauty inherent in the world of 3-D microscopic computed tomography. 3-D microscopic computed tomography has, up until now, mostly been used for medicinal purposes; but these intrepid colleagues saw more. They wanted to let others in on the secrets of a hidden inner beauty.
They had the hardware in place, and they were able to select an appropriate medium (small natural and man-made objects). However, not all pieces to the puzzle were immediately available. The scans themselves were visually interesting, but they would need more analysis, more computation, more interpretation to turn them into true works of art.
Enter the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute. With the help of SCI Institute and Visual Influence software and visualization expertise from Tommy Johnson and Dave Weinstein, years of dedicated development and fine-tuning paid off; Dr. Keller was finally able to realize his vision. He formed an organization called Studio Frido, and is currently working on creating prints and books for distribution to the public.
Because of the SCI Institute's indispensable contribution, and with the unflagging determination of Studio Frido, the inspiring, once-hidden inner beauty inherent small things will now be available to the world.
If you'd like to see the hidden inner beauty of natural and man-made objects, visit www.studiofrido.com. For more information, email info@studiofrido.com.
Steve Corbató Named Associate Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute
 Photo courtesy of EE Times |
Steve most recently served as Managing Director for Technology Direction and Development at Internet2, a non-profit, university-led consortium focused on developing and deploying advanced Internet technologies. In that role, he oversaw a broad portfolio of initiatives in high-performance networking, middleware, network diagnostics, and security. He also worked to develop overall strategy and key relationships for Internet2’s next generation of network infrastructure.
Steve is recognized as a long-time advocate for the development of regional optical networks. In addition to overseeing the Internet2 K-20 Initiative as well as Internet2's relationship with the Quilt, the national collaborative of advanced regional networks, he was a founder of the FiberCo™ dark fiber acquisition vehicle for higher education. He also was responsible for the Abilene Network, which provides high-performance connectivity and access to advanced network services to over 240 research universities and affiliated institutions in the United States. Starting in 2002, he led the upgrade of Abilene to a 10-Gbps national backbone.
Prior to joining Internet2 in June 2000, Corbató held several advanced networking positions at the University of Washington, Seattle. He also has served as an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering there. Steve earned his degrees in Physics from Rice University (B.A.) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D.). He later did post-doctoral work at the University of Utah.
Steve started at the SCI Institute on May 15, 2006 and can be reached via electronic mail at
.
For more information, contact:
Chris Johnson, Ph.D.
Director,
Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute
University of Utah
www.sci.utah.edu
(801) 581-7705
Claudio Silva Receives Second IBM Faculty Award
Dr. Claudio Silva has been honored once again with a coveted IBM Faculty Award. This award is designed to promote innovative, collaborative research and honor outstanding faculty working in disciplines of interest to IBM. Dr. Silva is being recognized for his work developing efficient rendering techniques for large-scale scientific visualization.
Much of modern science and engineering occurs on a computer, analyzing data collected from a variety of sources. Often the size of the datasets under analysis overwhelms the processing ability of whatever computer resources are available. Usually, in order to visualize a dataset it is necessary to have the entire dataset in main memory at once. Dr. Silva's project is developing faster, more efficient algorithms for processing large data and methods for dynamically loading only those parts of the data immediately needed for visualization. These methods show great promise for significantly improving our ability to visualize large datasets.
This award includes $30,000 to support ongoing research. This is the second year in a row IBM has chosen to honor Dr. Silva with this award.
Steve Parker Listed Among HPCwire's 2006 "People to Watch"
2006 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing to be hosted by SCI Institute
SCI Images Featured on Computational Science and Engineering Book Series Cover
A number of SCI Institute images were chosen by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) to adorn the cover of their Computational Science and Engineering book series. All but two of the images on the cover are from the SCI Institute.
The images selected cover a wide range of our research including C-SAFE container dynamics, aerodynamic vortex breakdown, argon bubble shockwave interaction, weather simulation, and MEG source localization. See this web page created by SIAM for more information on the research behind the images:
About the Computational Science and Engineering Book Series Cover
Chris Johnson Co-authors Two National Reports
NIH/NSF Visualization Research Challenges Report
NSF Blue Ribbon Report on Simulation Based Engineering Science
