Viz NET and Visualization activities at STFC Lakshmi

Viz. NET and Visualization activities at STFC Lakshmi Sastry Applications Group E-Science Centre Science & Technology Facilities Council m. sastry@rl. ac. uk

Viz. NET viz. NET - UK National Visualization Network funded by the JISC Support of Research Committee. It is a collaboration between a number of visualization centres: • to share knowledge, • to communicate best practice between application domains. • to provide training and support to researchers in visualization. The rationale is that consolidating the strengths of major visualization centres and groups across the UK will help the UK to realize the full potential of emerging visualization techniques and resources at a National and Regional level.

Viz. NET partners Professor Roy Kalawsky (Loughborough University) Professor K. W. Brodlie (Leeds University) Professor N. Avis (Cardiff University) Dr. Martin Turner (Manchester University) Dr. Lakshmi Sastry (STFC) Other partners, associates, collaborators and visualization researchers: 3 DVISA (JISC funded Arts and Humanities Network) Professor Martin Dove (Cambridge University) Professor David Duce (Oxford Brookes University) Dr. Richard Blake (STFC) Dr. Helen Wright (Hull University) Julian Gallop (STFC) Dr Nijad Al-Najdawi ( Coordinator, Loughborough University) Dr. Ian Grinstead (Cardiff University) Srikanth Nagella (STFC)

Viz. NET activities Please visit http: //www. viznet. ac. uk

Forthcoming events Viz. NET Showcase 2008 – submission deadline 14 th March Second Computational Steering School, 18 -19, March 2008 at Manchester University GIANT – Display Wall Workshop, 2 -3, April at Leeds University Viz. NET Annual Event – May at Loughborough University

Resources at STFC • Dedicated 17 node commodity cluster for visualization • Accessible through the National Grid Service • Uses the same GSI based security • Supports remote interactive visualization • Open source software stack • A variety of commercial and free visualization toolkits are available • Interface to the desktop

Schematic Overview of STFC Visualization Services Desktop layer Matlab IDL Web Java FLTK Computational Steering Interaction management Data management Simulations Visualization Data Third party data transfer Job management SRB Persistent objects for job monitoring My. Proxy certificate management Client-side communication backend classes and libraries (C++, Java)

Experimental National Visualization Service • STFC Viz. NET offers a ENVS to quantify and qualify the need by the UK research community for a National Visualization service • We offer one to one help for getting started and visualization support for application scientists from myself and the Group • Use of a range of advanced visualization services in near real-time for extremely large datasets • High resolution image processing and 3 D reconstruction, displayed to user’s desktop and other high-end display walls etc