INDUSTRY

CHAMPAIGN, IL -- On June 3, as many as 2.5 million people will get a glimpse of stunning simulations computed by scientists with the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) and turned into digital animations by visualization artists and programmers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. That's the date when the Discovery Channel will premier a new science documentary called "Unfolding Universe" (8 p.m Central Daylight Time). The show follows a team of astronomers and scientists to find clues about the origins of our galaxy. The scientists attempt to pinpoint the location of a strange and dangerous presence-- a massive black hole--hidden at the core of the galaxy. The NCSA-produced visualizations comprise 20 minutes of the documentary, almost half the total air time. Included is a spectacular rendition of a flight from earth to the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy. Thomas Lucas produced and directed the film. Donna Cox, NCSA's interim division director for experimental technologies and a professor in the University of Illinois School of Art and Design, and Robert Patterson, an NCSA visualization programmer, co-produced. Cox, Patterson, and Stuart Levy, NCSA senior research programmer, spent months working with leading astronomers, astrophysicists, and computational scientists using NCSA's Virtual Director software to develop visually dramatic animations that help tell the story of the birth and life of the Milky Way galaxy. Virtual Director enables users to navigate through complex computer datasets and create camera choreography in a collaborative virtual environment. "We have created animations for television and movies in the past, but we've never done anything quite this comprehensive before," said Cox. "We produced all the 3D digital graphics for this show, and it has been an intense, rewarding, collaborative project involving people all over the globe." In total, the Virtual Director team delivered 29,413 frames of visualizations to Lucas for use in the show. Many of the visualizations were computed on the NCSA visualization group's 80-processor Tiled Display Wall Linux cluster. The animations include the work of a variety of Alliance scientists and users of NCSA and Alliance resources: *Three simulations by Tom Abel, an astrophysicist at Penn State University, illustrate how the universe's first cosmological objects formed, how the first stars within them were born, and how they eventually died. The computations were done with ENZO, a structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) cosmological hydrodynamics code developed by Greg Bryan, Oxford University, and Michael Norman, an Alliance cosmologist at the University of California, San Diego. Ralf Kaehler, of the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Gravitationsphysik and Zuse Institute Berlin, developed a special volumetric rendering extension to software called Amira, which made it possible to smoothly render the AMR nested grid data into stunning 3D images. *Simulations by Ed Seidel, of the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institute) and NCSA, show two colliding black holes. The simulations were the largest ever done by Seidel's research group and depict rotation of black holes, with a collision occurring about one-third of the way through the rotation. The computations, done on NCSA's Itanium Linux cluster and at U.S. Department of Energy facilities, used more than 1 million processor hours. Werner Benger, a visualization specialist at the Max-Planck-Institut and Zuse Institute Berlin, created the visualizations and worked with the Virtual Director team to develop the animations. *Work by Paul Woodward, head of the University of Minnesota's Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering and an Alliance researcher, and LCSE computational scientist David Porter depict stellar evolution. The simulations show stellar fluid dynamics in a star that has exhausted its supply of hydrogen and is nearing the end of its life, a process that is staggeringly complex and turbulent, and requires massive computing power to simulate and visualize. *Depictions of the evolution of the early universe and interacting galaxies were also done by UCSD's Norman. The simulations were computed at NCSA and show how hydrogen and helium in the early universe form protogalaxies as well as the complex interactions among cosmological objects. *Stellar cluster dynamics simulations were developed from data computed by Simon Portegies Zwart, University of Amsterdam, and Steve McMillan, Drexel University. These simulations were embedded into the animated flight from the Earth, past numerous galactic center structures and into the massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Reference imagery and scientific consulting was provided by astronomers Mark Morris, UCLA, and Doug Roberts, Northwestern University and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. *Simulations of colliding galaxies were taken from data computed by Chris Mihos, Case Western Reserve University, and Lars Hernquist, Harvard University. In addition, the Virtual Director team created visualizations from astronomical data collected through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and by University of Hawaii astronomer Brent Tulley, who has compiled a database of the "local" universe that can be observed from Earth. "Through innovative technology and the dedicated work of creative professionals like Donna Cox and Bob Patterson, we have been able to create a film that shows the dynamics of our universe more clearly and in more detail than ever before," said Lucas. "For filmmakers, Virtual Director is a wonderful tool that improves your ability to tell a story. For the general public, it is a way to take huge, complicated computations done by the world's best scientists and depict them as something that can be appreciated, understood and admired." Added Patterson, "Virtual Director and our immersive visualization environment at NCSA enable us to create exciting, graceful voyages through scientific datasets and take the audience on a voyage through the universe." Visit www.ncsa.edu for additional information.