June 24, 1997 Contact: Robert Irion (408) 459-2495; irion@ua.ucsc.edu

UC SANTA CRUZ RECEIVES $460,000 FROM NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION FOR SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION LABORATORY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, soon will create powerful and informative graphical images from their data at a new interdisciplinary laboratory, thanks to a $460,000 equipment grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The Division of Natural Sciences at UCSC will match the federal grant with about $240,000 in funding and equipment, making the new lab worth about $700,000.

Once researchers establish the lab in the Applied Sciences Building this fall, campus scientists in a wide variety of disciplines will for the first time have access to a central facility for cutting- edge visualization.

"This grant enables us to put together a state-of-the-art visualization facility that wouldn't otherwise be possible," said project director Jane Wilhelms, associate professor of computer science and an expert in computer graphics. "It will be a wonderful resource for our scientists who already use scientific visualization. I expect that many others at UCSC will begin to use visualization in their research as well."

Today's complex scientific research makes visualization an essential tool, Wilhelms said. This especially is true for researchers who explore variations over a complex surface or within a volume of space. Large sets of numbers, in and of themselves, can reveal some useful knowledge. But when a scientist sees the data--with help from colors, shading, vectors, and other visual aids--crucial insights often emerge much more strikingly.

Eleven faculty members joined Wilhelms on UCSC's proposal to NSF, representing seven diverse disciplines: astronomy and astrophysics, chemistry and biochemistry, computer science, computer engineering, earth sciences, ocean sciences, and physics. Researchers from the Natural Sciences Division's other programs-- biology, mathematics, and science communication--also will use the facility, she said. Students working on research projects with faculty in the division will have opportunities to learn how to use the lab and incorporate it into their research.

The grant and the campus matching funds will pay for an advanced multiprocessor graphics workstation and supporting hardware, worth several hundred thousand dollars. This system likely will be the most powerful and expensive computer system on campus, Wilhelms said.

Also planned is an array of audiovisual equipment, such as film recorders and video editors, color printers, and equipment for viewing three-dimensional graphics images. The latter may include a "virtual workbench," a large table onto which researchers may project 3-D data for viewing with stereo glasses. Similar facilities now exist at Stanford University and the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

Finally, the funds will pay part of the salary of a staff technician to manage the lab and help researchers use it.

Work planned at the new lab by various UCSC researchers includes the following:

-- Wilhelms and colleague Allen Van Gelder, associate professor of computer science, will continue to develop new methods to visualize large and complex sets of data. Applications for their software include materials engineering, simulations of fluid flow and the dynamics of molecules, and analysis of data from medical, atmospheric, and oceanographic instruments.

-- Patrick Mantey, dean designate of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, and assistant professor of computer science Alex Pang will extend the visualization component of a five-year research program, called REINAS, that focuses on environmental data from the Monterey Bay Area. Pang, a graphics expert, and his collaborators have devised several new ways to image data from the ocean and atmosphere in real time.

-- Professor of physics Joel Primack, who initiated and helped to organize UCSC's successful grant application, will use the new equipment for research in cosmology. Currently, Primack's group must use computers at other facilities to create dramatic visualizations of theoretical models of how large-scale structure in the universe has evolved.

"It will be far better to be able to interact visually with the output from our supercomputer simulations here at UCSC, rather than remotely," Primack said.

-- Astronomers Sandra Faber and David Koo will translate their observations of distant galaxies into rich visual displays. Faber and Koo are part of a team at UCSC that will use the Hubble Space Telescope and the large twin telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to gather data on thousands of distant galaxies. The lab will help them simulate the histories of galaxies and study their distribution in space.

Other key users will include assistant professor of computer science Suresh Lodha, who will devise new methods of visualizing shapes and uncertainties in scientific data; professor of physics Stanley Flatte, for studies of how waves move through the ocean, atmosphere, and earth; associate professor of chemistry Ilan Benjamin, for simulations of chemical reactions that occur at the boundaries between two substances; professor of earth sciences Thorne Lay, for 3-D modeling of geological structures within the planet; and professor of ocean sciences Geoffrey Vallis, for research on turbulence and other complex behaviors in the ocean and atmosphere.

Editor's note: You may reach Jane Wilhelms at wilhelms@cse.ucsc.edu or (408) 459-2440.

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