VISUALIZATION

NCSA has organized a symposium to be held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). "Big, Small and Everything in Between: Simulating Our World Using Scientific Computing" will feature five researchers whose work uses computational models and high-performance computers to simulate our universe, our planet, and its life. The panel will be held from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 15 in the Hyatt Regency Chicago, Columbus GH and the panelists will be available for a press briefing at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 14 in Hyatt Regency Ballroom D.

Supercomputing power is rapidly increasing, with typical systems performing trillions of calculations every second. NCSA and its partners are at work on a supercomputer, called Blue Waters, that will be capable of sustained performance of 1 petaflop when it comes online in 2011; that means that the real science and engineering applications researchers use every day will run an astonishing 1 quadrillion calculations every second.

The AAAS symposium will discuss this move to petascale computing and how this computational capability will revolutionize science and engineering, opening the door to discoveries that will advance our understanding of the world and innovations that can make us healthier, safer, and more prosperous.

Researchers participating in the symposium are:

• Klaus Schulten, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Schulten will describe the "computational microscope" that offers new views of cellular processes and structures, providing dynamic information that is not available from experiments.
• Jeroen Tromp, California Institute of Technology: Tromp will detail his research team's efforts to simulate global seismic wave propagation, a frontier that can be explored only through large-scale computation. He will describe problems that sustained petascale computing will help seismologists address.
• Kelvin Droegemeier, University of Oklahoma: Each year in the United States severe weather causes deaths and economic losses of more than $13 billion. Droegemeier will explain the key role petascale computing will play in improving our understanding of tornadoes, floods, and winter storms.
• Tiziana Di Matteo, Carnegie Mellon University: Matteo takes a novel approach to understanding galaxy formation, tracking the growth of supermassive black holes. These two processes are intertwined so complex theoretical modeling of both is required.
• Gerhard Klimeck, Purdue: Klimeck's research group uses simulation to better understand the flow of electrons through nanoscale device; their ultimate goal is not just to advance their own understanding but to create modeling tools that can be used by other researchers, educators, and students.

The discussion will be led by NCSA Director Thom Dunning and Deputy Director Rob Pennington.

Dunning also will be a panelist for a symposium titled "Earth's History and Future Revealed at the Frontier of Scientific Computing," which will be 8:30 to 10 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 13 in Columbus GH.

In the Columbian room of the Hyatt, NCSA's Advanced Visualization Lab will exhibit 4K super-high-resolution 3D stereo animations of scientific phenomena, from colliding galaxies to the formation of a tornado to the flow of traffic on Chicago's streets. These impressive images began with data produced from supercomputing simulations; then the AVL team worked intensively with researchers in disciplines from astronomy to atmospheric science to understand and represent the data accurately and artfully. The resulting work has been seen by thousands of people at planetariums, museums, and in televised documentaries on PBS, the Discovery Channel, and the National Geographic Channel. By translating data into images, NCSA's visualization team shares cutting-edge science with the broadest possible public audience.