Lab transforms research data into visualizations

Turning data into an image requires serious computational power.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center presented its new visualization lab designed to help researchers throughout the UT system analyze data through a variety of advanced technologies.

The center’s 2,900-square foot “VisLab” is housed on the ground floor of the Advanced Computational Engineering and Sciences building on campus, and it is available on a reservation-only basis to researchers who use scientific visualization.

“Scientific visualization is basically taking data and making it into an image, much like the radars on weather reports or making a bar, pie or line graph on Microsoft Excel,” said visual scientist Paul Navratil.

The center built the lab using a $500,000 collaborative grant from Dell Inc., Intel Corporation, Microsoft Corporation and Cisco Systems.

The centerpiece of the lab is a 184-megapixel visual display screen donated by Dell known as the Stallion, Navratil said. An average desktop computer screen displays about two megapixels.

“The Stallion allows scientists to get inside their data on a scale which was not possible before,” Navratil said.

The lab also features a Sony Projection System with a 20-by-11-foot display, four high-end Dell workstations with large LCD displays and a conference room.

The lab is readily available to the UT community, and although most of the users to date are graduate students and professors mainly in physics and engineering, the computing center wants to broaden their reach by developing uses for the lab outside of the scientific world, Navratil said.

“Our department is looking at three-dimensional images from microscopes, and the equipment in this lab will allow us to view larger visuals at a faster pace and to make
computations without having to move to another system,” said Christopher Gilpin, an assistant professor of cell biology at UT-Southwestern Medical Center.

The lab was dedicated Friday, and some professors are excited about
being able to use the newly available technology.

“It’s really a big deal that we have a lab space like this on campus,” Navratil said. “There are only two other panels that can display visuals at this size — one in California and one at NASA.”

1 comments

Paul Navratil

Mon Oct 20 2008 11:32

A correction: there are three larger panels that we know of: one at UC-San Diego (287M pixels), one at UC-Irvine (256M pixels), and one at NASA Ames (205M pixels). The fifth-largest is also at UCSD (125M pixels).

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