Scientific
Applications:
Sandia OFFERS A GRID VISUALIZATION
SOLUTION FOR DOCTORS
A surgeon in New York who wants the opinion quickly of a specialist in Los
Angeles probably would send medical MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] files as
e-mail attachments or make them accessible in Internet drop zones.
Unfortunately for patients on operating tables, extremely large files may
take
a half-hour to transmit and require a very large computer ( perhaps not
available ) to form images from the complicated data. Additionally, each
rotation of the image for better viewing can take minutes to appear.
Now, interactive remote-visualization hardware that allows doctors to view
and manipulate images based on very large data sets as though standing in the
same room has been developed at Sandia National Laboratories.
The tool also will work for engineers, military generals, oil exploration
teams, or anyone else with a need to interact with computer-generated images
from remote locations.
"The niche for this product is when the data set you're trying to visualize
is
so large you can't move it, and yet you want to be collaborative, to share it
without sending copies to separate locations," says Sandia team leader Lyndon
Pierson.
Stretching Video Cables
The Sandia hardware, for which a patent has been applied, allows the data
to
be kept at the main location but sends images to locations ready to receive
them. The interactivity then available is similar to two people operating a
game board.
The lag time between action and visible result is under 0.1 second even
though
the remote computer is thousands of miles away and the data sets, huge.
"We expect our method will interest oil companies, universities, the
military
-- anywhere people have huge quantities of visualization data to transmit and
be jointly studied," says Pierson. "Significant commercial interest [in the
new device] has been demonstrated by multiple companies."
The Sandia hardware leverages without shame the advances in 3D commercial
rendering technology "in order not to re-invent the wheel," says Sandia
researcher Perry Robertson.
Graphics cards for video games have extraordinary 2-D and even 3-D
rendering
capabilities within the cards themselves. But images from these cards,
typically fed to nearby monitors, do not solve the problem of how to plug them
into a network, says Robertson.
Fortunately, the Sandia extension hardware looks electronically just like a
monitor to the graphics card, says Robertson. "So, to move an image across the
Internet, as a first step our device grabs the image."
Transmitting Image And Response
The patented Sandia hardware squeezes the video data flooding in at nearly
2.5
gigabits a second into a grid network pipe that carries less than 0.5
gigabits/sec.
"While compression is not hard, it's hard to do fast. And it has to be
interactive, which streaming video typically is not," says Pierson.
The Sandia compression minimizes data loss to ensure image fidelity. "Users
need to be sure that the things they see on the screen are real, and not some
artifact of image compression," he says.
The group knew that a hardware solution was necessary to keep up with the
incoming video stream.
"Without it, the receiver's frame rate would be unacceptably slow," says
Robertson. "We wanted the user to experience sitting right at the
supercomputer from thousands of miles away."
"In an attempt to reduce the need for additional hardware," says John
Eldridge, a Sandia researcher who wrote the software applications, "we also
created software versions of the encoder and decoder units for testing
purposes. However, there is only so much you can do in software at these high
resolutions and frame rates."
The custom-built apparatus has two boards ( one for compression, the other
for
expansion. The boards use standard low-cost SDRAM memory, like that found in
most PCs, for video buffers. Four reprogrammable logic chips do the main body
of work. A single-board PC running Linux is used for supervisory
operations.
"We turned to Linux because of its networking support and ease of use,"
says
Ron Olsberg, a Sandia project engineer.
"We built this apparatus for very complex ASCI visualizations. If we could
have bought it off the shelf, we would have," says Robertson.
Funded by ASCI's [Advanced Scientific Computing Initiative] Problem-Solving
environment, a pair of boards cost about $25,000, but are expected to cost
much less when commercially available.
A successful demonstration took place in late October between Chicago and
the
Amsterdam Technology Center in the Netherlands. A second demonstration
occurred between Sandia locations in Albuquerque and Livermore and the show
floor of the Supercomputing 2002 convention in Baltimore in November.
"Now that this technology is out there, we expect other applications will
begin to take advantage of it," says Pierson. "Their experiences and
improvements will eventually feed back into US military capability."
Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a
Lockheed
Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security
Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M. and Livermore,
CA. Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and
environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.
http://www.sandia.gov
Sandia news releases, news tips, science photo gallery, and periodicals can
be
found at the news and events button.
- Sandia National Laboratories
- A Department of Energy National
Laboratory, Managed and Operated by Sandia Corporation Albuquerque, NM
Livermore, CA. Media Relations Department MS 0165 Albuquerque, NM 87185-0165
Phone: 505-844-8066.
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