Fakespace Systems Inc. today announced that it has delivered the world’s highest resolution visualization room to the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This breakthrough room size immersive viewing environment provides a 43 million pixel display to help ASC researchers better understand and leverage the massive amounts of data generated by the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Stewardship Program. Fakespace Systems has designed and built nine visualization systems housed at Los Alamos, four of which are housed at the Nicholas C. Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation. These include several tiled PowerWall Theaters, desk-based systems and the prototype of what has become the Fakespace FLEX reconfigurable display. The new immersive visualization system is a 15-ft. wide by 10-ft. deep and 12-ft. high room in which images are rear-projected onto three walls, the ceiling and the floor. A total of 33 stereoscopic digital projectors are seamlessly tiled to produce continuous images that meet the laboratory’s requirements for unprecedented brightness, resolution and dynamic color range so that small details and subtle phenomena can be easily detected and analyzed.
 |
As a worldwide leader in the employment of predictive simulation science, Los Alamos National Laboratory is using the new immersive facility in its primary ASC mission, which is to maintain the U.S. government nuclear stockpile without underground testing. Potential future uses include work in crisis prediction, climate modeling, and in understanding the impact of natural and man-made disasters on infrastructure such as transportation, power, telecommunications and water delivery systems. Planning for the two-story facility, which implements immersive viewing on a scale larger than any previously built system, began in March 2002, with design, build out and installation taking place in just 18 months. Fakespace worked closely with the facilities team at Los Alamos to resolve issues related to pre-existing space limitations, and to accommodate for extraordinary system weight, power requirements, heat generation, as well as safety and secure access. “We began using the new immersive facility in March this year,” said Bob Greene, Visualization Specialist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Our researchers are viewing simulations based on computations that generate more data than is contained in the entire print collection of the Library of Congress in one calculation. Even with datasets that have been reviewed for many years, immersive viewing at this scale is now revealing significant discoveries. With its high pixel density and extreme resolution, this stereoscopic visualization room is an important development in our efforts to advance the nature of predictive simulation science.”
 |
Extreme Resolution At Los Alamos single simulations have generated as much as 652 terabytes of data. In order to analyze the highly detailed structures in such enormous datasets, extreme resolution is required to eliminate artifacts that are sometimes generated at lower resolutions. Los Alamos researchers divide the visualization process into four stages, starting with insight and discovery followed by debugging and data validation. In the debugging stage, data accuracy down to the minutest detail is important in finding errors in the complex meshes which are visualized. For example, one white pixel when all the others are red could indicate an error, or an important phenomenon. Stereo viewing with an extremely large field of view and very sharp and precise detail is essential for this level of analysis.
 |
Collaboration and Shared Data The five-sided design was chosen because it is more comfortable for long periods of use, such as a full day at a time, than completely enclosed six-sided environments. According to Steve Stringer, the Installation Project Leader for the Cave, “an immersive environment engages the entire brain to solve a problem to help solve it faster. Five sides provides a sense of immersion without feeling closed in.” The open configuration also serves well for presentation style reviews with observers facing the immersive room from outside the screen threshold.
 |
The immersive system is also part of a larger network of systems, and data viewed there can also be viewed on researcher desktops and on the other immersive displays at the Nicholas C. Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation. According to Mr. Stringer, the immersive facility is also connected to other national laboratories around the country via a very “fat and secure pipe,” for remote collaboration and data sharing. Software and Systems The EnSight software for three-dimensional scientific visualization from Computational Engineering International is fully integrated into the immersive room and used as a standard platform throughout the ASC facility. While users can work with a standard mouse and keyboard in the visualization room, EnSight also allows motion tracking and physical interaction with simulations using a glove interface and a stylus.
 |
The software runs on a special SGI Onyx4 3900 supercomputer, which is configured with 34 graphics engines (or pipes) so that all 33 projectors display one integrated stereoscopic image that changes in real time with the users’ movement. Each projector is an active stereo 3-chip DLP system with 2,000 lumens brightness providing native 1280 x 1024 pixel density. “The ASC Program at Los Alamos National Laboratories had the vision to create a large-scale visualization environment that goes beyond any system in use today,” said Dr. Chris Clover, CEO of Fakespace Systems Inc. “It has been exciting to participate in making this vision a reality. I’m quite sure that new immersive room will contribute to breakthrough insights in the basic sciences that will help protect and preserve the world that we live in.” Los Alamos National Laboratory will exhibit at booth #312 at Supercomputing 2005, SC|05, an international conference on high performance computing, networking and storage, that takes place November 14-17, 2005 at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle, Washington.
