Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment Research Articles

SAGE-based Tiled Display Wall enhanced with dynamic routing functionality triggered by user interaction

To empower scientists who are engaged in nation-wide or global-scale collaborative projects for scientific discovery, a large amount of scientific data needs to be visualized and then shared among the scientists. Tiled Display Wall (TDW) has been widely accepted and used for visualization of large-scale scientific data. Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) has received attention from scientists as a middleware that organizes multiple display monitors into a network-aware large display monitor. Using a SAGE TDW, scientists can display multiple visualized contents on a single display monitor, each of which can be located at geographically distant site managed by other organizations. However, SAGE does not have a mechanism for managing multiple visualized data streams heading to a single TDW. In a conventional network, data flows for a same destination tend to share a same link, resulting in drop of packets and therefore poor visual quality. Moreover, because of the flexible nature of SAGE, rate of each visual data flow may change dynamically as a result of user interaction on a TDW, such as moving and resizing an application window. For the reason above, we propose and develop a dynamic route allocation method that switches packet flows onto network links where better performance is expected, in response to user interaction such as window movement and resizing. Technically, we have leveraged OpenFlow, an implementation of Software Defined Networking (SDN), to integrate network programmability into SAGE. In this paper, we show how SAGE enhanced with the proposed method succeeded in avoiding network congestion and improving the quality of visualization on the TDW over the wide area OpenFlow network on the Internet.

Reimagining the microscope in the 21st century using the scalable adaptive graphics environment

Background: Whole-slide imaging (WSI), while technologically mature, remains in the early adopter phase of the technology adoption lifecycle. One reason for this current situation is that current methods of visualizing and using WSI closely follow long-existing workflows for glass slides. We set out to “reimagine” the digital microscope in the era of cloud computing by combining WSI with the rich collaborative environment of the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE). SAGE is a cross-platform, open-source visualization and collaboration tool that enables users to access, display and share a variety of data-intensive information, in a variety of resolutions and formats, from multiple sources, on display walls of arbitrary size. Methods: A prototype of a WSI viewer app in the SAGE environment was created. While not full featured, it enabled the testing of our hypothesis that these technologies could be blended together to change the essential nature of how microscopic images are utilized for patient care, medical education, and research. Results: Using the newly created WSI viewer app, demonstration scenarios were created in the patient care and medical education scenarios. This included a live demonstration of a pathology consultation at the International Academy of Digital Pathology meeting in Boston in November 2014. Conclusions: SAGE is well suited to display, manipulate and collaborate using WSIs, along with other images and data, for a variety of purposes. It goes beyond how glass slides and current WSI viewers are being used today, changing the nature of digital pathology in the process. A fully developed WSI viewer app within SAGE has the potential to encourage the wider adoption of WSI throughout pathology.

Integration of Fogo Player and SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment) for 8K UHD Video Exhibition

After 4K, 8K UHD resolution can be considered the new challenge for film, visualization and television. Due to the dimension of 8K image, the remote micro and macro images are considered appropriate for visualization with scientific and educational purposes. This article describes the implementation of the 8K video plug-in to play UHD videos into the SAGE, a collaborative environment for the advancement of scientific research and education developed by EVL (Electronic Visualization Laboratory), upgrading its current resolution for video playing. It also presents the challenges of producing 8K content, the development of the code and introduces the features to view 8K ultra high definition videos in multiple tiles through the use of low cost computer clusters. The SAGE 8K video plug-in implementation was made possible because of the previous development of the Fogo Player, a system to run 4K and 8K content. The results were successfully presented at the CineGrid International Workshop 2013 in San Diego.

Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment: A Novel Way to View and Manipulate Whole-Slide Images

Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment: A Novel Way to View and Manipulate Whole-Slide Images

Using Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment and a Tiled Display to Provide an Active Learning Environment in an Academic Pathology Department

Using Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment and a Tiled Display to Provide an Active Learning Environment in an Academic Pathology Department

A Multi-Application Controller for SAGE-enabled Tiled Display Wall in Wide-area Distributed Computing Environments

Due to the recent advancement of networking and high-performance computing technologies, scientists can easily access large-scale data captured by scientific measurement devices through a network, and use huge computational power harnessed on the Internet for their analyses of scientific data. However, visualization technology, which plays a role of great importance for scientists to intuitively understand the analysis results of such scientific data, is not fully utilized so that it can seamlessly benefit from recent high-performance and networking technologies. One of such visualization technologies is SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment), which allows people to build an arbitrarily sized tiled display wall and is expected to be applied to scientific research. In this paper, we present a multi-application controller for SAGE, which we have developed, in the hope that it will help scientists efficiently perform scientific research requiring high-performance computing and visualization. The evaluation in this paper indicates that the efficiency of completing a comparison task among multiple data is increased by our system.

Ultrascale Collaborative Visualization Using a Display-Rich Global Cyberinfrastructure

The scalable adaptive graphics environment (SAGE) is high-performance graphics middleware for ultrascale collaborative visualization using a display-rich global cyberinfrastructure. Dozens of sites worldwide use this cyberinfrastructure middleware, which connects high-performance-computing resources over high-speed networks to distributed ultraresolution displays.

The first functional demonstration of optical virtual concatenation as a technique for achieving Terabit networking

The optical virtual concatenation (OVC) function of The Terabit LAN was demonstrated for the first time at the iGrid 2005 workshop in San Diego, California. The TERAbit-LAN establishes a lambda group path (LGP) for an application where the number of lambdas/L2 connections in a LGP can be specified by the application. Each LGP is logically treated as one end-to-end optical path, so during parallel transport, the LGP channels have no relative latency deviation. However, optical path diversity (e.g. restoration) can cause LGP relative latency deviations and negatively affect quality of service. OVC hardware developed by NTT compensates for relative latency deviations to achieve a virtual bulk transport for the Electronic Visualization Laboratory’s (EVL) Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment application.

Real-time multi-scale brain data acquisition, assembly, and analysis using an end-to-end OptIPuter

At iGrid 2005 we demonstrated the transparent operation of a biology experiment on a test-bed of globally distributed visualization, storage, computational, and network resources. These resources were bundled into a unified platform by utilizing dynamic lambda allocation, high bandwidth protocols for optical networks, a Distributed Virtual Computer (DVC) [N. Taesombut, A. Chien, Distributed Virtual Computer (DVC): Simplifying the development of high performance grid applications, in: Proceedings of the Workshop on Grids and Advanced Networks, GAN 04, Chicago, IL, April 2004 (held in conjunction with the IEEE Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid2004) Conference)], and applications running over the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) [L. Renambot, A. Rao, R. Singh, B. Jeong, N. Krishnaprasad, V. Vishwanath, V. Chandrasekhar, N. Schwarz, A. Spale, C. Zhang, G. Goldman, J. Leigh, A. Johnson, SAGE: The Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment, in: Proceedings of WACE 2004, 23–24 September 2004, Nice, France, 2004]. Using these layered technologies we ran a multi-scale correlated microscopy experiment [M.E. Maryann, T.J. Deerinck, N. Yamada, E. Bushong, H. Ellisman Mark, Correlated 3D light and electron microscopy: Use of high voltage electron microscopy and electron tomography for imaging large biological structures, Journal of Histotechnology 23 (3) (2000) 261–270], where biologists imaged samples with scales ranging from 20X to 5000X in progressively increasing magnification. This allows the scientists to zoom in from entire complex systems such as a rat cerebellum to individual spiny dendrites. The images used spanned multiple modalities of imaging and specimen preparation, thus providing context at every level and allowing the scientists to better understand the biological structures. This demonstration attempts to define an infrastructure based on OptIPuter components which would aid the development and design of collaborative scientific experiments, applications and test-beds and allow the biologists to effectively use the high resolution real estate of tiled displays.