Thomas Fogal

Update: I have found a job. I start at nvidia on May the 4th, 2015.

I hold a couple different affiliations these days. I am a:

I have previously been affiliated with the Universität des Saarlandes, the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (briefly), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (briefly), and the University of New Hampshire.

I did my masters and undergraduate work at the University of New Hampshire. My thesis committee consisted of Prof. Bergeron, Prof. Hatcher, and Prof. Childs. In January 2012, I began my Ph.D. with Jens Krüger at the Universität des Saarlandes, but shortly thereafter we moved up to the Ruhr area to form the HPC group at the Universität Duisburg-Essen.

My interests lie in parallel and distributed systems, particularly their application to large scale visualization. This has thus far been focused in multiresolution and in situ volume visualization.

Publications

If you notice any BibTeX errors, typos, etc. please contact me. Also, please note that these are my personal copies of papers, and may contain minor edits, changes, or reformatting as compared to the versions in published volumes (as one example, in our 2010 HPG paper I had screwed up a label in one of our graphs; it's printed wrong, but the paper here is correct). I will never make substantial changes, but "substantial" is entirely in my subjective opinion; if you want the original paper, get it from the publisher.

*Publications*
Teaser	Authors	Title	Materials			Venue
Teaser	Authors	Title	Paper	BibTeX	Presentation	Venue
2018
	Tim Biedert, Peter Messmer, Thomas Fogal, Christoph Garth	Hardware-accelerated multi-tile streaming for realtime remote visualization (best paper!)				EGPGV
2016
	Cameron Christensen, Thomas Fogal, Nathan Luehr, Cliff Woolley	Topology-aware image compositing using NVLink				LDAV
	Jie Jiang, Thomas Fogal, Cliff Woolley, Peter Messmer	A Lightweight H.264-based Hardware Accelerated Image Compression Library				LDAV
2015
	Thomas Fogal, Jens Krüger	An approach to lowering the in situ visualization barrier			—	ISAV
2014
	Thomas Fogal, Fabian Proch, Alexander Schiewe, Olaf Hasemann, Andreas Kempf, Jens Krüger	Freeprocessing: Transparent in situ visualization via data interception			—	EGPGV
2013
	Thomas Fogal, Alexander Schiewe, Jens Krüger	An analysis of scalable GPU-based ray-guided volume rendering (honorable mention)			recording	LDAV
	Hermilo Hernández, Jovana Knežević, Thomas Fogal, Todd Sherman, Tatjana Jevremovic	Visual numerical steering in 3D AGENT code system for advanced nuclear reactor modeling and design			—	Annals of Nuclear Energy
	Christopher Butson, Georg Tamm, Sanket Jain, Thomas Fogal, Jens Krüger	Evaluation of Interactive Visualization on Mobile Computing Platforms for Selection of Deep Brain Stimulation Parameters			—	TVCG
2012
	Carson Brownlee, Thomas Fogal, Charles D. Hansen	GLuRay: Ray Tracing in Scientific Visualization Applications using OpenGL Interception			—	EGPGV'12
2011
	Thomas Fogal, Jens Krüger	Efficient IO for Parallel Visualization			lost :-(	EGPGV'11
	Hank Childs, Brugger, Whitlock, Meredith, Ahern, Bonnell, Miller, Weber, Harrison, Pugmire, Fogal, Garth, Sanderson, Bethel, Durant, Camp, Favre, Rübel, Navratil, Wheeler, Selby, Vivodtzev	VisIt: An End-User Tool for Visualizing and Analyzing Very Large Data			—	SciDAC 2011
2010
	Thomas Fogal, Jens Krüger	Tuvok, an Architecture for Large Scale Volume Rendering			—	VMV 2010
	Thomas Fogal, Hank Childs, Siddharth Shankar, Jens Krüger, R. D. Bergeron, P. Hatcher	Large Data Visualization on Distributed Memory Multi-GPU Clusters				HPG 2010
2009
	E. W. Bethel, C.R. Johnson, S. Ahern, J. Bell, P.-T. Bremer, H. Childs, E. Cormier-Michel, M. Day, E. Deines, T. Fogal, C. Garth, C.G.R. Geddes, H. Hagen, B. Hamann, C.D. Hansen, J. Jacobsen, K.I. Joy, J. Krüger, J. Meredith, P. Messmer, G. Ostrouchov, V. Pascucci, K. Potter, Prabhat, D. Pugmire, O. Rübel, A. Sanderson, C.T. Silva, D. Ushizima, G.H. Weber, B. Whitlock, K. Wu	Occam's Razor and Petascale Visual Data Analysis			—	Journal of Physics: Conference Series
	Thomas Fogal, Jens Krüger	(poster) Size Matters - Revealing Small Scale Structures in Large Datasets			—	World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering
	Jens Krüger, Thomas Fogal	(poster) Focus and Context: Visualization without the Complexity			Poster	World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering

Notable Work

Our 2013 'An analysis of scalable GPU-based ray-guided volume rendering' paper was an honorable mention at LDAV 2013!
The software I help develop was used to teach high school students about the scientific process/method.
Longhorn press release in which I was interviewed about our work for our 2010 HPG paper. Looks like the same story also got picked up by HPCWire and Dr. Dobbs.
iOS (iPhone, iPad) volume rendering software. I occasionally get interviewed so that I can take credit for my colleagues' work. In all seriousness, I do mention that Jens did the work here, but what the "scientist" says and what gets implied do not always align. There was also a second round covering basically the same thing (KSL), and an ACM TechNews story about it. I like the KSL link best, because you get to see me :)
Best Science Visualization Videos of 2009. I worked on this video.

Employment

I am presently at NVIDIA and eventually finishing up my doctorate in Germany (with Jens Krüger).

I spent the summer of 2008 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, working under the excellent guidance of Sean Ahern.

I spent summer 2007 in Livermore, California, working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on VisIt. Somehow I convinced them to provide a cluster, some parallel rendering libraries, and money, whilst all I had to do is play around with the software all day. I was extremely fortunate to work with the guidance of Hank Childs while I was out there.

At UNH, I was of course part of the computer science department. I also used to work for Dr. Raeder out of the physics department. To simplify greatly, I worked on various methods for visualizing large datasets. You can find out a lot about the types of things I worked on (or with) by Googling my name.

Sorry, I don't keep my resume online anymore. It was perpetually out of date, and rampaging killbots in the Octilian sector would scrape my email from it.

Contact

My username is `tfogal'. You should be able to figure out the domain associated with it by looking at the website you're visiting (hint: drop the "www."). I also use an alumni.unh.edu address somewhat frequently. I seem to confuse many people with this. It's not a real address; it just forwards to my SCI email at present, and 10: someday when I must leave here it'll forward to wherever I go next. GOTO 10.