Scientific visualization is an interdisciplinary branch of science concerned with the visualization of scientific phenomena. It is also considered a subset of computer graphics, a branch of computer science. The purpose of scientific visualization is to graphically illustrate scientific data to enable scientists to understand, illustrate, and glean insight from their data. Research into how people read and misread various types of visualizations is helping to determine what types and features of visualizations are most understandable and effective in conveying information.
Visualization or visualisation is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity. from history include cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, and Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary methods of technical drawing for engineering and scientific purposes.
In scientific visualization and computer graphics, volume rendering is a set of techniques used to display a 2D projection of a 3D discretely sampled data set, typically a 3D scalar field.
Wen-mei Hwu is the Walter J. Sanders III-AMD Endowed Chair professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is on compiler design, computer architecture, computer microarchitecture, and parallel processing. He is a principal investigator for the petascale Blue Waters supercomputer, is co-director of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC), and is principal investigator for the first NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence at UIUC. At the Illinois Coordinated Science Lab, Hwu leads the IMPACT Research Group and is director of the OpenIMPACT project – which has delivered new compiler and computer architecture technologies to the computer industry since 1987. From 1997 to 1999, Hwu served as the chairman of the Computer Engineering Program at Illinois. Since 2009, Hwu has served as chief technology officer at MulticoreWare Inc., leading the development of compiler tools for heterogeneous platforms. The OpenCL compilers developed by his team at MulticoreWare are based on the LLVM framework and have been deployed by leading semiconductor companies. In 2020, Hwu retired after serving 33 years in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently, Hwu is a Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at Nvidia Research and Emeritus Professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is an advanced computing research center that is based on comprehensive advanced computing resources and supports services to researchers in Texas and across the U.S. The mission of TACC is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies. Specializing in high performance computing, scientific visualization, data analysis & storage systems, software, research & development and portal interfaces, TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable the research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support researchers who use these resources. TACC staff members conduct research and development in applications and algorithms, computing systems design/architecture, and programming tools and environments.
ParaView is an open-source multiple-platform application for interactive, scientific visualization. It has a client–server architecture to facilitate remote visualization of datasets, and generates level of detail (LOD) models to maintain interactive frame rates for large datasets. It is an application built on top of the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) libraries. ParaView is an application designed for data parallelism on shared-memory or distributed-memory multicomputers and clusters. It can also be run as a single-computer application.
VisIt is an open-source interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data. It can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on 2D and 3D structured and unstructured meshes. VisIt was designed to handle big data set sizes in the terascale range and small data sets in the kilobyte range.
The John and Marcia Price College of Engineering at the University of Utah is an academic college of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. The college offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering and computer science.
Amy Ashurst Gooch is a computer scientist known for her contributions in non-photorealistic rendering. She is currently the Chief Operations Officer at ViSOAR LLC, a data visualization research spin-off software company from the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. She is also an adjunct professor of computer science at Texas A&M University. Her current research is part of an interdisciplinary effort involving computer graphics, perceptual psychology, and computational vision. She is interested in better understanding the spatial information potentially available in CG imagery, determining what spatial cues are actually used when CG imagery is viewed, and using this information to create improved rendering algorithms and visualizations.
MeVisLab is a cross-platform application framework for medical image processing and scientific visualization. It includes advanced algorithms for image registration, segmentation, and quantitative morphological and functional image analysis. An IDE for graphical programming and rapid user interface prototyping is available.
Christopher Ray Johnson is an American computer scientist. He is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Utah, and founding director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute (SCI). His research interests are in the areas of scientific computing and scientific visualization.
GPULib is discontinued and unsupported software library developed by Tech-X Corporation for accelerating general-purpose scientific computations from within the Interactive Data Language (IDL) using Nvidia's CUDA platform for programming its graphics processing units (GPUs). GPULib provides basic arithmetic, array indexing, special functions, Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT), interpolation, BLAS matrix operations as well as LAPACK routines provided by MAGMA, and some image processing operations. All numeric data types provided by IDL are supported. GPULib is used in medical imaging, optics, astronomy, earth science, remote sensing, and other scientific areas.
Visual computing is a generic term for all computer science disciplines dealing with images and 3D models, such as computer graphics, image processing, visualization, computer vision, virtual and augmented reality and video processing. Visual computing also includes aspects of pattern recognition, human computer interaction, machine learning and digital libraries. The core challenges are the acquisition, processing, analysis and rendering of visual information. Application areas include industrial quality control, medical image processing and visualization, surveying, robotics, multimedia systems, virtual heritage, special effects in movies and television, and computer games.
Claudio Silva is a Brazilian American computer scientist and data scientist. He is a professor of computer science and engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, the head of disciplines at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and affiliate faculty member at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He co-developed the open-source data-exploration system VisTrails with his wife Juliana Freire and many other collaborators. He is a former chair of the executive committee for the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics.
The Kahlert School of Computing is a school within the College of Engineering at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Gordon L. Kindlmann is an American computer scientist who works on information visualization and image analysis. He is recognized for his contributions in developing tools for tensor data visualization.
ROCm is an Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) software stack for graphics processing unit (GPU) programming. ROCm spans several domains: general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), high performance computing (HPC), heterogeneous computing. It offers several programming models: HIP, OpenMP/Message Passing Interface (MPI), OpenCL.
Nvidia RTX is a professional visual computing platform created by Nvidia, primarily used in workstations for designing complex large-scale models in architecture and product design, scientific visualization, energy exploration, and film and video production, as well as being used in mainstream PCs for gaming.
Kwan-Liu Ma is an American computer scientist. He was born and grew up in Taipei, Taiwan and came to the United States pursuing advanced study in 1983. He is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. His research interests include visualization, computer graphics, human computer interaction, and high-performance computing.
Nvidia GTC is a global AI conference for developers that brings together developers, engineers, researchers, inventors, and IT professionals. Topics focus on artificial intelligence (AI), computer graphics, data science, machine learning and autonomous machines. Each conference begins with a keynote from Nvidia CEO and Founder Jensen Huang, followed by a variety of sessions and talks with experts from around the world.
