Silicon Graphics Inc Research Articles

POINT CLOUD MANAGEMENT THROUGH THE REALIZATION OF THE INTELLIGENT CLOUD VIEWER SOFTWARE

Abstract. The paper presents a software dedicated to the elaboration of point clouds, called Intelligent Cloud Viewer (ICV), made in-house by AESEI software (Spin-Off of Politecnico di Bari), allowing to view point cloud of several tens of millions of points, also on of “no” very high performance systems. The elaborations are carried out on the whole point cloud and managed by means of the display only part of it in order to speed up rendering. It is designed for 64-bit Windows and is fully written in C ++ and integrates different specialized modules for computer graphics (Open Inventor by SGI, Silicon Graphics Inc), maths (BLAS, EIGEN), computational geometry (CGAL, Computational Geometry Algorithms Library), registration and advanced algorithms for point clouds (PCL, Point Cloud Library), advanced data structures (BOOST, Basic Object Oriented Supporting Tools), etc. ICV incorporates a number of features such as, for example, cropping, transformation and georeferencing, matching, registration, decimation, sections, distances calculation between clouds, etc. It has been tested on photographic and TLS (Terrestrial Laser Scanner) data, obtaining satisfactory results. The potentialities of the software have been tested by carrying out the photogrammetric survey of the Castel del Monte which was already available in previous laser scanner survey made from the ground by the same authors. For the aerophotogrammetric survey has been adopted a flight height of approximately 1000ft AGL (Above Ground Level) and, overall, have been acquired over 800 photos in just over 15 minutes, with a covering not less than 80%, the planned speed of about 90 knots.

The LONI Pipeline Processing Environment

The analysis of raw data in neuroimaging has become a computationally entrenched process with many intricate steps run on increasingly larger datasets. Many software packages exist that provide either complete analyses or specific steps in an analysis. These packages often possess diverse input and output requirements, utilize different file formats, run in particular environments, and have limited abilities with certain types of data. The combination of these packages to achieve more sensitive and accurate results has become a common tactic in brain mapping studies but requires much work to ensure valid interoperation between programs. The handling, organization, and storage of intermediate data can prove difficult as well. The LONI Pipeline Processing Environment is a simple, efficient, and distributed computing solution to these problems enabling software inclusion from different laboratories in different environments. It is used here to derive a T1-weighted MRI atlas of the human brain from 452 normal young adult subjects with fully automated processing. The LONI Pipeline Processing Environment’s parallel processing efficiency using an integrated client/server dataflow model was 80.9% when running the atlas generation pipeline from a PC client (Acer TravelMate 340T) on 48 dedicated server processors (Silicon Graphics Inc. Origin 3000). The environment was 97.5% efficient when the same analysis was run on eight dedicated processors.

Preface to the proceedings

This Special Part of the ANZIAM Journal (supplement) contains the refereed papers from the tenth Biennial Computation Techniques and Applications Conference (CTAC2001) held at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, during 16-18 July 2001. The CTAC series of conferences is held under the auspices of the Computational Mathematics Group of the Australian and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ANZIAM) division of the Australian Mathematics Society. They provide a forum for scientists, engineers, and mathematicians interested in the development of computational techniques and their application to problems of practical importance. Previous conferences in the CTAC series have been held at University of Sydney (1983), University of Melbourne (1985), University of Sydney (1987), Griffith University, Brisbane (1989), University of Adelaide (1991), Australian National University, Canberra (1993), Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne (1995), University of Adelaide (1997), Australian National University, Canberra (1999). There were about 100 participants at the conference, five of whom gave keynote addresses as part of the general program for CTAC2001-these speakers and the titles of their presentations were: Real Time Optimisation and Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for Large DAE Models Prof Hans-Georg Bock, Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR), Heidelberg, Germany; Some Computational Problems Arising in Continuous Time Finance Prof Carl Chiarella, School of Finance and Economics, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia; Matrix Decomposition Algorithms in Finite Element Methods for Poisson's Equation Prof Graeme Fairweather, Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, USA. Computational Problems in Landscape Design for Conservation Prof Hugh Possingham, Departments of Zoology and Mathematics, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; Iterative Methods for Nonsymmetric Ill-posed Problems Prof Lothar Reichel, Kent State University, Ohio, USA; In addition to these invited presentations, 74 contributed papers were presented at the conference. Of these, 48 were submitted for consideration for the CTAC2001 Proceedings, and 43 were accepted for publication after each was peer-reviewed by at least two referees and the papers revised to the satisfaction of the referees. Following the convention established in previous CTAC proceedings, the papers appearing here have not been grouped by topic; the abstracts of the five invited speakers are included, followed by the contributed papers in alphabetical order of the first author. As with previous CTAC Proceedings, the papers cover a wide variety of topics with the usual CTAC emphasis on both industrial applications and numerical techniques. A new feature is the marked number of presentations in the areas of financial mathematics and computational biology. The editors thank the referees for their time and assistance with the refereeing process, and the ANZIAM Journal of the (supplement) for agreeing to publish the proceedings as a journal special issue. Also, the editors would like to especially acknowledge the hard work of the Organising Committee and in addition, Jerard Barry, Markus Hegland and Yvette Zuidema. CTAC2001 Organising Committee A/Prof John A. Belward (Dept of Mathematics, University of Queensland), Prof K. Burrage (Chair, Dept of Mathematics, University of Queensland), Dr G. Chandler (Dept of Mathematics, University of Queensland), Dr K. Gates (Dept of Mathematics, University of Queensland), Dr Graeme J. Pettet (School of Mathematical Sciences, Queensland University of Technology), Dr Wayne Read (James Cook University), Prof Tony Roberts (Dept of Mathematics and Computing, University of Southern Queensland), Dr Roger B. Sidje (Dept of Mathematics, University of Queensland), Dr Elliot Tonkes (Department of Mathematics, University of Queensland). Acknowledgements Financial sponsorship from the following organisations is gratefully acknowledged: The University of Queensland Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI)

A new system for multicomponent seismic processing

A new seismic data-processing program package was developed at the Program for Crustal Studies at the University of Wyoming. The new system has a well-developed job-description language similar to that used by some commercial analogs. Unlike commercial systems, our seismic monitor supports a structured multicomponent seismic data stream, which facilitates programming of complex processing algorithms. The monitor employs a unique backpropagation processing strategy, giving additional flexibility to the processing flow. The organization of the system allows parallelizing of the computations in a natural way. Over 60 seismic processing modules have already been developed for our system. Special interfaces allow inclusion of older modules developed for other processing systems. The system was written using C programming language, with some modules using FORTRAN. It operates under the UNIX environment on SUN Sparc and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) Indigo 2 workstations, and on a four-processor SGI Power Challenge L.

Performance of a storage system for supporting different video types and qualities

Future video-on-demand (VoD) servers will need to support many existing and emerging video data types. These data types include 15-fps (frames per second) animation, 30-fps National Television Systems Committee (NTSC) quality video, and 60-fps high definition television (HDTV) video. The different display speeds and frame sizes of these various video types impose a major constraint on the design of VoD storage systems. This paper presents the results of an experimental study, conducted on a Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) Onyx computer system, that investigated the impact of these video types on the design of a VoD storage system. The key issues involved in supporting these different video types in a VoD environment are as follows: (1) the video allocation method and (2) the proper size (a block is a basic unit of several contiguous video frames that will be accessed from several disks each time a request is made) to use for data striping and retrieval. Two allocation schemes, logical volume striping and application level striping, along with varying frame and sizes for each of the three different video data types are examined. The focus of our study is to determine the maximum number of concurrent accesses that can be supported with a guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS). The degree of scalability (i.e., striping data over more disk arrays) of the experimental VoD system used is also studied. Based on our experimental results, application level striping demands smaller sizes for all three video types, and more concurrent accesses can be distributed over the storage devices. The experimental results demonstrate that application level striping has excellent scalability for animation and NTSC videos.

Performance of a Mass-Storage System for Video-on-Demand

Advancements in storage technology along with the fast deployment of high-speed networks has allowed the storage, transmission, and manipulation of multimedia information such as text, graphics, still images, video, and audio to be feasible. Our study focused on the performance of the mass storage system for a large-scale video-on-demand server. Different video file striping schemes, such as application level striping and device driver level striping, were examined in order to study scalability and performance issues. To study the impact of different concurrent access patterns on the performance of a server, experimental results were obtained on group access on a single video file and multiple group accesses on multiple video files. All of our experiments were conducted on a fully configured Silicon Graphics Inc. Onyx computer system. The Onyx machine was connected to 31 SCSI-2 channels which have 496 GBytes disk storage, 20 MIPS R4400 processors, and 768 MBytes main memory. From the experimental results, the storage system of Onyx machine can potentially provide about 360 concurrent video accesses with guaranteed quality of service.

Glyphmaker: creating customized visualizations of complex data

Glyphmaker allows nonexpert users to customize their own graphical representations using a simple glyph editor and a point-and-click binding mechanism. In particular, users can create and then alter bindings to visual representations, bring in new data or glyphs with associated bindings, change ranges for bound data, and do these operations interactively. They can also focus on data down to any level of detail, including individual elements, and then isolate or highlight the focused region. These features empower users, letting them employ their specialized domain knowledge to create customized visual representations for further exploration and analysis. For ease of design and use, we built Glyphmaker on top of Iris Explorer, the Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) dataflow visualization system. The current version of Glyphmaker has been successfully tested on a materials system simulation. We are planning a series of tests and evaluations by scientists and engineers using real data.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>