[Colloquium] Reminder: Papka/Dissertation Defense/Jan 30, 2009

[Margaret Jaffey]

This is a reminder about Mike Papka's dissertation defense tomorrow
(Friday, Jan. 30th).

       Department of Computer Science/The University of Chicago

                     *** Dissertation Defense ***


Candidate:  Michael Papka

Date:  Friday, January 30, 2009

Time:  1:00 PM

Place:  RI 405 (Research Institutes)

Title: Visualization and Collaboration Technologies to Support
High-Performance Computing Research

Abstract:
High performance computing has become an increasingly important
fixture in science, from aiding in the processing of data collected in
experiments, to acting as a virtual laboratory in which experiments
are done. Thus, high performance computing is creating a third branch
of scientific effort. This trend has driven research and development
in a variety of different areas from fundamental hardware design to
the software that makes the resources useful. With each iteration of
this development cycle computational science has become more and more
complex. This effort addresses this complexity in two key interrelated
areas: visualization and collaboration.

Visual representation is the key method to simplify the explanation of
a complex environment. Consequently, a large research and development
community effort has grown to support scientific visualization. It has
also spawned research in advanced displays to provide infrastructure
for exploring data products. These include immersive displays like the
CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment or high resolution displays
constructed of multiple individual units like the ActiveMural. This
work includes influential contributions in all of these areas.

At the same time, complex tasks are often simplified by effort
sharing. We see that the teams of individuals working together to do
this new form of science have become larger and more distributed.
Research efforts in collaboration technology have grown to address
this problem. Here we describe the Access Grid and tools built for
sharing information as part of this effort. As will be seen in this
thesis, collaboration technology both relies on visualization
technology and supports it in enabling interactions at a distance.

Throughout this work we have taken a user driven iterative approach
using real applications from a variety of scientific domains. This
end-to-end testbed approach guarantees realistic experimental
circumstances with real world stresses and constraints.

The main contributions of this dissertation are: a) discovery of
requirements for the connecting of collaboration and visualization
technology to high performance computing; b) development of
infrastructure and demonstrations for enabling coupled advanced
displays and high performance resources, including the first remote
connection of two spatially immersive virtual environments (CAVE to
CAVE); and c) development of infrastructure for efficient pixel
transport using commodity video codecs to support collaborative
scientific visualization.

Candidate's Advisor: Prof. Rick Stevens

Login to the Computer Science Department website for details,
including a draft copy of the dissertation:

 https://www.cs.uchicago.edu/phd/phd_announcements#papka

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Margaret P. Jaffey            margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 156)               (773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago      http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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