HR: 1340h
AN: NG43A-0443    [Abstracts]
TI: Interactive Collaborative Visualization in the Geosciences
AU: Bollig, E F
EM: bollig@msi.umn.edu
AF: Dept. of Geology and Geophysics and Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 United States
AU: * Kadlec, B J
EM: kadlec@msi.umn.edu
AF: Dept. of Geology and Geophysics and Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 United States
AU: Erlebacher, G
EM: erlebach@csit.fsu.edu
AF: School of Computational Science and Information Technology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306 United States
AU: Yuen, D A
EM: davey@krissy.geo.umn.edu
AF: Dept. of Geology and Geophysics and Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 United States
AU: Palchuk, Y M
EM: yuliya@msi.umn.edu
AF: Dept. of Geology and Geophysics and Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 United States
AB: Datasets in the earth sciences continue growing in size due to higher experimental resolving power, and numerical simulations at higher resolutions. Over the last several years, an increasing number of scientists have turned to visualization to represent their vast datasets in a meaningful fashion. In most cases, datasets are downloaded and then visualized on a local workstation with 2D or 3D software packages. However, it becomes inconvenient to download datasets of several gigabytes unless network bandwidth is sufficiently high (10 Gbits/sec). We are investigating the use of Virtual Network Computing (VNC) to provide interactive three-dimensional visualization services to the user community. Specialized software [1,2] enables OpenGL-based visualization software to capitalize on the hardware capabilities of modern graphics cards and transfer session information to clients through the VNC protocol. The virtue of this software is that it does not require any changes to visualization software. Session information is displayed within java applets, enabling the use of a wide variety of clients, including hand-held devices. The VNC protocol makes collaboration and interaction between multiple users possible. We demonstrate the collaborative VNC system with the commercial 3D visualization system Amira (http://www.tgs.com) and the open source VTK (http://www.vtk.org) over a 100 Mbit network. We also present ongoing work for integrating VNC within the Naradabrokering Grid environment. [1] Stegmaier, S. and Magallon, M. and T. Ertl, "A Generic Solution for Hardware-Accelerated Remote Visualization," Joint Eurographics -- IEEE TCVG Symposium on Visualization, 2002. [2] VirtualGL--3D without boundaries http://virtualgl.sourceforge.net/installation.htm
DE: 9820 Techniques applicable in three or more fields
SC: Nonlinear Geophysics [NG]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting