Qiao Wei, McLennan Michael, Kennell Rick, Ebert David S, Klimeck Gerhard
Purdue University, USA.
IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2006 Sep-Oct;12(5):1061-8. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2006.150.
The Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) has developed a science gateway at nanoHUB.org for nanotechnology education and research. Remote users can browse through online seminars and courses, and launch sophisticated nanotechnology simulation tools, all within their web browser. Simulations are supported by a middleware that can route complex jobs to grid supercomputing resources. But what is truly unique about the middleware is the way that it uses hardware accelerated graphics to support both problem setup and result visualization. This paper describes the design and integration of a remote visualization framework into the nanoHUB for interactive visual analytics of nanotechnology simulations. Our services flexibly handle a variety of nanoscience simulations, render them utilizing graphics hardware acceleration in a scalable manner, and deliver them seamlessly through the middleware to the user. Rendering is done only on-demand, as needed, so each graphics hardware unit can simultaneously support many user sessions. Additionally, a novel node distribution scheme further improves our system's scalability. Our approach is not only efficient but also cost-effective. Only a half-dozen render nodes are anticipated to support hundreds of active tool sessions on the nanoHUB. Moreover, this architecture and visual analytics environment provides capabilities that can serve many areas of scientific simulation and analysis beyond nanotechnology with its ability to interactively analyze and visualize multivariate scalar and vector fields.
计算纳米技术网络（NCN）在nanoHUB.org上开发了一个用于纳米技术教育和研究的科学网关。远程用户可以浏览在线研讨会和课程，并在其网络浏览器中启动复杂的纳米技术模拟工具。模拟由一个中间件支持，该中间件可以将复杂任务路由到网格超级计算资源。但该中间件真正独特之处在于它使用硬件加速图形来支持问题设置和结果可视化的方式。本文描述了将远程可视化框架设计并集成到nanoHUB中，用于纳米技术模拟的交互式视觉分析。我们的服务灵活处理各种纳米科学模拟，以可扩展的方式利用图形硬件加速对其进行渲染，并通过中间件无缝地将它们交付给用户。渲染仅在需要时按需进行，因此每个图形硬件单元可以同时支持多个用户会话。此外，一种新颖的节点分布方案进一步提高了我们系统的可扩展性。我们的方法不仅高效而且具有成本效益。预计只需六个渲染节点就能支持nanoHUB上数百个活跃的工具会话。此外，这种架构和视觉分析环境提供的功能可以服务于纳米技术之外的许多科学模拟和分析领域，因为它能够交互式地分析和可视化多变量标量和矢量场。
