Designed especially for neurobiologists, FluoRender is an interactive tool for multi-channel fluorescence microscopy data visualization and analysis.
Deep brain stimulation
BrainStimulator is a set of networks that are used in SCIRun to perform simulations of brain stimulation such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and magnetic transcranial stimulation (TMS).
Developing software tools for science has always been a central vision of the SCI Institute.

General News

Laura Lediaev wins the Utah Rendering Competition for the 3rd straight year

christmas teapots 9Congratulations to Laura Lediaev, who won the Utah Rendering Competition for the third year in a row. Laura's entry, titled Christmas Teapots, was the overall winner and receiver of the audience choice award. The rendering is based on creating time-varying composites of light layers in order to simulate the effect of twinkling Christmas lights and flickering candles. The scene has 30 lights, one inside each teapot. Light layers are created during rendering by saving the contribution of each light into its own image. This produced 30 images/layers. Each light produced 4,000 samples per pixel. That adds up to 120,000 samples per pixel after compositing. Laura allowed up to 10 diffuse light bounces and 200 specular bounces.

For more information on the project, visit http://www.omnigraphica.com/classes/cs6620/contest2016.html






Visualizing the Universe

Charles Hansen 591x394Utah engineers co-developing space simulation software for planetariums and home computers.

Sept. 7, 2016 – If space is the final frontier, OpenSpace could become the final frontier in space simulation software.

Computer scientists from the University of Utah will be working with researchers from New York University's Tandon School of Engineering and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to develop OpenSpace, an open-source 3-D software for visualizing NASA astrophysics, heliophysics, planetary science and Earth science missions for planetariums and other immersive environments. The software also will be developed for use in schools and on home computers.

Bei Wang Joins the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science

beiBei Wang has joined the University of Utah's Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. The SCI Institute focuses on solving important problems in biomedicine, science, and engineering using computation and is an international research leader in the areas of scientific computing, visualization, and image analysis.

Dr. Wang received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University in 2010. There, she also earned a certificate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. She was a postdoctoral fellow from 2010 to 2011, and a research scientist from 2011 to 2016, both at the SCI Institute, University of Utah.

Science-ArtQuiz

leonardoThe SCI Institute recently contributed to the Science-ArtQuiz with the Leonardo. Can you distinguish Science from Art???

Paintbrush or microscope? Einstein or Picasso? Is there any difference? Challenge your inner genius with this unique, mind bending science vs art quiz. Can you get a perfect score?

Take the quiz at http://www.theleonardo.org/science-artquiz/

SCI Research Highlighted in Argonne's 10 Year Celebration

02316 10yr berzins 850Modeling detonations to transport explosives safely

Researchers modeled a 2005 explosion that left a 30-by-70-foot crater in a Utah highway, capturing the physics that made the truck's cargo explode more violently than it should have. With such simulations, we can design safer transport for explosives. Led by Martin Berzins, University of Utah

You can see the 10 highlights at https://www.alcf.anl.gov/articles/10-science-highlights-celebrating-10-years-argonne-leadership-computing-facility

INCITE Awards 351 Million Core Hours to Martin Berzins and Team

small partINCITE Grants Awarded to 56 Computational Research Projects

Newswise — OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Nov. 16, 2015–The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science announced 56 projects aimed at accelerating discovery and innovation to address some of the world's most challenging scientific questions. The projects will share 5.8 billion core hours on America's two most powerful supercomputers dedicated to open science. The diverse projects will advance knowledge in critical areas ranging from sustainable energy technologies to next-generation materials.

Valerio Pascucci on Cool Science Radio

cool science radioValerio Pascucci, Professor, from the School of Computing and Alessandra Angelucci, Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Science featured on KCPW and Cool Science Radio.

You can listen to the podcast here.

NCI Grant for Personalized Cancer Diagnostics and Prognostics to Alter and Team

orly groupOrly Alter has been awarded a five-year, three million-dollar National Cancer Institute (NCI) grant for the project "Multi-Tensor Decompositions for Personalized Cancer Diagnostics and Prognostics." Co-investigators on her team include pathology professors Cheryl A. Palmer and Carl T. Wittwer, associate professor Elke A. Jarboe, and clinical assistant professor Reha M. Toydemir, and neurosurgery professor Randy L. Jensen.

Alter, a bioengineering associate professor and a faculty member of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, pioneered the matrix and tensor modeling of large-scale molecular biological data, which have been demonstrated to correctly predict previously unknown cellular mechanisms.

For more see the project website at https://physics.cancer.gov/network/UniversityofUtah.aspx.

Speeding up extreme big brain data analysis

Interactive software tool lets brain researchers explore large-scale, high-res imaging to better understand connections in the brain

October 26, 2015

It's tough to unravel the mysteries of the brain when your computer is frozen.

To aid frustrated brain researchers, a multidisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Utah has created a faster method for generating and exploring high-resolution, 3-D images of the brain.

3-D map of the brain: Utah researchers develop software to better understand brain’s network of neurons

Oct. 22, 2015

The animal brain is so complex, it would take a supercomputer and vast amounts of data to create a detailed 3-D model of the billions of neurons that power it.

But computer scientists and a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Utah have developed software that maps out a monkey's brain and more easily creates a 3-D model, providing a more complete picture of how the brain is wired. Their process was announced this week at Neuroscience 2015, the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago.

Exploring Large Data for Scientific Discovery

August 27, 2015 - Scott Gibson, Communications Specialist, University of Tennessee

More elegant techniques combined with highly interdisciplinary, multi-scale collaboration are essential for dealing with massive amounts of information, plenary speaker says at the XSEDE15 conference.

A curse of dealing with mounds of data so massive that they require special tools, said computer scientist Valerio Pascucci, is if you look for something, you will probably find it, thus injecting bias into the analysis.
XSEDE15 pascucci-sg

XSEDE15 pascucci sgIn his plenary talk titled "Extreme Data Management Analysis and Visualization: Exploring Large Data for Science Discovery" on July 28 during the XSEDE15 conference in St. Louis, Dr. Pascucci said that getting clean, guaranteed, unbiased results in data analyses requires highly interdisciplinary, multi-scale collaboration and techniques that unify the math and computer science behind the applications used in physics, biology, and medicine.