CONTACTS NCSA Contacts Directory http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Generai/NCSAContacts.html Allocations Education & Outreach Division Orders for Publications, http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Generai/A IIocations/ApplyTop.html http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/edu/EduHome.html NCSA Software, and Multimedia Radha Nandkumar John Ziebarth, Associate Director http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Pubs/ 217-244-0650 217-244-1961 TechResCatalog/TRC.TOC.html [email protected] [email protected] Debbie Shirley [email protected] Applications Division/Faculty Program Education http://www.ncsa.uiuc.ed u/Apps/Apps lntro.html Scott Lathrop Public Information Office Melanie Loots, Associate Director 217-244-1099 http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/ 217-244-2921 [email protected] PIO/NCSAinfo.html [email protected] i uc.edu John Melchi Outreach 217-244-3049 Al lison Clark (information) Alai na Kanfer 217-244-8195 fax 217-244-0768 217-244-0876 [email protected] [email protected] i uc.edu [email protected] Publications Group Visitors Program Training http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Pubs/ jean Soliday http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/ Pubslntro.html 217-244-1972 Training/training_homepage.html Melissa Johnson [email protected] u Mary Bea Walker 217-244-0645 217-244-9883 melissaj@ncsa .uiuc.edu Computing & Communications Division mbwalker@ncsa .uiuc.edu http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Generai/CC/CCHome.html Software Development Division Charles Catlett, Associate Director Industrial Program http ://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/SDGintro.html 217-333-1163 http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/lndusProg/ joseph Hardin, Associate Director [email protected] lndProg.html 217-244-7802 John Stevenson, Corporate Officer hardin@ncsa .uiuc.edu Ken Sartain (i nformation) 217-244-0474 217-244-0103 [email protected] jae Allen (information) sartain@ ncsa.u iuc.edu 217-244-3364 Marketing Communications Division [email protected] Consulting Services http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Generai/MarComm/ http://www.ncsa. uiuc.edu/General/ MarComm.html Staff Resource Center Consul ti ng/Consulti ngServices.html Maxi ne Brown, Associate Director http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Business/ 217-244-1144 217-244-7255 SRC/ncsasrc.html 8:30 a.m.-5:00p.m. Central Time maxi [email protected] iuc.edu recruiting, staffing, employment consult@ncsa .uiuc.edu 217-244-0634 Media Technology Resources [email protected] Networking http://fantasia.ncsa.uiuc.edu/media/ [email protected] Tony Baylis Virtual Environments Graphics Division 217-244-1996 http://www.ncsa.uiuc.eduNEG/ Technology Management Group [email protected] Tom DeFanti, Associate Director jeff Rosenda le [email protected] (services) 217-333-1527 217-244-0709 [email protected] [email protected] uc.ed u 217-244-0710 (serv ices/he lp) [email protected] NCSA Home Page Mailing Address NCSA Receptionist http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ NCSA 217-244-0072 Uni versity of Il linois at Urbana-Champaign 217-244-1987 fax 605 East Springfield Avenue Champaign, IL 61820-5518 RESEARCH Astrophysical Simulations Come Alive in a Cosmic Voyage 2 The Ups and Downdrafts of Simulating Tornadoes 6 Discovery at VI May Extend Life of Chips 12 Virtual Reality and etworks 14 MetaCenter Awards Resources 18 NEW TECHNOLOGY VRML: Animated Worlds for the Web 20 NC 'A Web Update 24 NCSA Multicast 27 PARTNERSHIPS Kodak Wins NC 'A's Industrial Grand Challenge Award 28 OUTREACH NCSA!UIUC Collaboration: UIUC Astronomy Students 30 Encounter the Web ChickScope: Web Technology Delivers Miracle of 32 Embryonic Discovery DEPARTMENTS Cover Images: Frames from the CSA Contacts Directory IMAX film Cosmic Voyage. Center Highlight 36 © Smithsonian Institution & Motorola Foundation. NC A A TEN-YEAR FOUNDATION FOR THE FUTURE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN RESEARCH Astrophysical Simulations Come Alive in a Cosmic Voyage by Sara latta Cosmic Voyage, a new !MAX fil m scheduled to debut at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in August, is typical of !MAX films in the feeling of sensory immersion it creates in its viewers. But the technology of its production . zs unzque. A sweeping journey through space and time, the film carries viewers from the largest structures in the known universe down to subatomic quarks; from the first few seconds after the big bang to the present day. Cosmic Voyage is one of the first IMAX films to use supercomputing simulations and the first IMAX film ever to use four minutes of research-quality scientific visualization. The four-minute segment, which begins shortly after the big bang, shows the expansion of the universe, the gravitational collapse of structure and the formation of galaxies, and the collision of two spiral galaxies. It was a result of the collaborative efforts of NCSA scientific visualization experts, scientists in the Grand Challenge Cosmology 3 Consortium (GC ), two movie production companies, and numerous high-performance computing machines at multiple centers. While the film's primary goal is to entertain and educate, those four minutes yielded unexpected scientific insights and spurred the development of new scientific visualization technology. Donna Cox, left, and Bob Patterson view a colliding-galaxies simulation inside the CAVE. At the heart of the collaboration is Donna Cox, UIUC professor of art and design and principal investigator of NCSA's Renaissance Experimental Laboratory. Cox, the associate producer for scientific visualization for Cosmic Voyage and the art director for the four-minute simulation segment, was involved in every step of the film's production-from the conceptual and fund-raising stage to consulting on the finishing touches. 2 NCSA access Summer 1996 From science to art-and back again The first scene of the four-minute sequence depicts the expansion and evolution of a nearly homogeneous universe a fraction of a second after the big bang, to the era cal led recombination, when protons and electrons combine to form hydrogen atoms and when photons part company with matter. This scene uses an algorithm (written by Greg Bryan, a graduate student working in the laboratory of UIUC Astronomy Professor and NCSA Senior Research Scientist Michael Norman) based on the Harrison-Zel'dovich spectrum describing the den­ sity fluctuations in the early universe. Pixar, the movie produc­ tion company famous for creating Toy Story, ran the simulation and created the visualization for this sequence. The first scene segues into the hierarchical collapse of structure, starting with a large-scale overview showing the early formation of web-like filaments, then traveling along a fi lament to show the formation of galaxies along knots in the filaments. The scene concludes with a cluster of galaxies forming at the intersection of filaments. This scene, which lasts 70 seconds, is based on a simulation run by Frank Summers, a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at 3 Princeton University and member of the GC . The simulation follows the evolution of 2.1 million dark matter particles and 2.1 mil lion gas particles. Pixar, which was consumed with Toy Story, lacked the disk space, the networks, the human resources, and the computing power to deal with this and the following simula­ tion. "This project moved from a Hollywood production to a major supercomputer/mass storage chal lenge/' says Cox, who assumed responsibility for coordinating the simulations and visualizations for the subsequent scenes . " NCSA's POWER CHALLENGEarray, high-speed networks, and mass storage pro­ vided the resources to tackle the chall enge." Each IMAX motion-picture frame is about 10 times the area of a standard frame of 35-mi llimeter (m m) film. Because of this, creati ng images for the giant IMAX screen demands simulations of unprecedented resolution. In Summers' case the resolution had to be 10 times greater than anything he had done previously. In turn NCSA produced extremely high-resolution images from the data, at 4,096 x 3,002 pixels. NCSA allowed Summers to use one of its (then) new SGI POWER CHALLENGE machines to run the calculations. " I basically ran it full out, using all eight processors, for a solid month," says Summers. The result: 120 gigabytes of remarkable data. "A cluster of ga laxies has internal gas," explains Summers. "When a ga laxy, composed of both gas and stars, falls into a cluster, the hot gas [of the cluster] interacts with and strips the gas from the ga laxy-something we call RAM-pressure stripping. When I looked at the data, the amount of RAM-pressure stripping was much greater than I had previously suspected. There were long streamers of gas trailing behind these ga laxies that had fallen into the cluster." The final 1 minute and 50 seconds of the sequence-the collision and the merging of two spiral galaxies-is based on a simulation carried out by Chris Mihos and Lars Hernquist of the University of California, Santa Cruz, on San Diego Supercomputer Center's CRAY C90 system. (Mihos is now a Images from a galaxy-collision sequence in the Smithsonian's Hubble Fellow at Johns Hopkins University.) The scientists IMAX movie. The galaxies merge over a billion years to form a modeled the gravitational interplay of 250,000 particles representing galaxies by making local estimates of the pressure, single massive structure. density, and temperature of interstellar gas. NCSA access Summer 1996 3 RESEARCH The virtual camera and its path is shown in the 30 space of two colliding galaxies. This view is created from a secondary virtual camera inside the CAVE with Thiebaux's Virtual Director renderer. Achieving the exact degree of resolution required 750 assistant, managed