San Diego Supercomputer Center Cloud Selected as Data Archival Site

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at
the University of California, San Diego, has
been selected as the archival host site for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE) annual SciVis contest, which poses challenging research
problems in science and engineering to the scientific visualization community.

Under the five-year agreement, SDSC will archive the visualizations in the SDSC
Cloud, believed to be the largest academic-based cloud storage system in the
U.S. The SDSC Cloud is designed for researchers, students, academics, and
industry users who require stable, secure, and cost-effective storage
and sharing of digital information, including large data sets.

Kitware Inc. has committed to mirror the
data on SDSC Cloud through the Midas platform. All SciVis contests since 2004
have been consolidated under one website.

"We are delighted to provide
archiving services via the SDSC Cloud for this annual contest, which is designed
to help develop novel ways in which data can be analyzed using advanced
visualization tools and techniques," said SDSC director Michael
Norman.

The contest’s data archive has become a test bed for applying newly
developed techniques on a range of easily available and open
reference data sets with well-defined problems.

"It’s important to encourage open
accessibility and diversity of datasets, as well as the visualization and
analysis of larger scale data that is becoming more and more common throughout
the scientific community," said Amit Chourasia, a senior visualization
scientist with SDSC and former chair of the SciVis contest, who helped
facilitate the archiving project using the SDSC Cloud. "Now we can curate many of the challenging
and open reference datasets where newer techniques can be demonstrated and
compared with existing ones."

Formerly called the Vis Contest, the SciVis competition focuses on a different
field of science each year. Contestants are provided a set of scientific
questions and underlying data, and then tasked with developing new ways to
analyze the data using visualization techniques.

This year’s winners, recently announced, were Katrin Scharnowski, Michael
Krone, Filip Sadlo, and Philipp Beck, from the University of Stuttgart,
Germany, for their entry called Visualization of Polarization Domains in
Barium Titanate. The winners will present their work at the VisWeek conference
October 14-19, 2012, in Seattle, WA.

Dr. Stepano Leoni, Max Planck Institute Chemical Physics of Solids, Dresden,
Germany, provided the data and problems for this year’s contest. The contest
chair was Gabriel Zachmann, University of Bremen, and the co-chair was Jean
Favre, of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center.

"These contests have served a very
important role to stimulate the visualization community with new and
challenging problem sets each year," said Russell Taylor, SciVis
conference chair for 2012 and a research professor at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. "The
contest not only provides a new challenge to established researchers, but also
to students who are getting their feet wet in visualization."

A new SciVis contest for 2013 will be formally announced at the 2012 VisWeek
conference with a problem focus on brain imaging. The contest is open to all.