Guest Speaker
Multi-scale Morse Theory and Data Streaming for Science Discovery
Valerio Pascucci
Center for Applied Scientific Computing
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
May 1 2008 3:30PM
480 Dreese Labs
All interested parties are invited to attend.
Refreshments will served in the lecture room immed
Abstract:
Advanced techniques for understanding large scale scientific data are a crucial ingredient for the success of any supercomputing center. Developing such techniques involves a number of major challenges such as the real-time management of massive data, or the quantitative analysis of scientific features of unprecedented complexity. Addressing these challenges requires interdisciplinary research in diverse topics including the mathematical foundations of data representations, the design of robust, efficient algorithms, and the integration with relevant applications in physics, biology, or medicine.
In this talk, I will present a discrete topological framework for the representation and analysis of large scale scientific data. Due to the combinatorial nature of this framework, we can implement the core constructs of Morse theory without the approximations and instabilities of classical numerical techniques. We use topological cancellations to build multi-scale representations that capture local and global trends present in the data. The inherent robustness of our combinatorial algorithms allows us to address the high complexity of the feature extraction problem for high resolution scientific data.
To address the data management problem, we introduced a novel cache oblivious data layout that enables high performance selective queries on multiple terabytes of raw data. The combination of this data model with progressive streaming techniques allows us to achieve interactive processing rates on simple workstations or laptop computers.
I will demonstrate how our system has enabled the first successful quantitative analysis of two massively parallel simulations. The first is the study of the turbulent mixing layer of hydrodynamic instabilities. The second is the study of the structural properties of porous media under stress and failure.
During the talk, I will provide a live demonstration of some software tools developed in this effort. To conclude, I will discuss the organization of the project and highlight the key aspects that enabled us to successfully execute the development of new techniques and their deployment.
Bio:
Valerio Pascucci is the Data Analysis Group Leader of the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California Davis. Prior to his CASC tenure, he was a senior research associate at the University of Texas at Austin, Center for Computational Visualization, CS and TICAM Departments. Valerio's research interests include scientific data analysis, progressive multi-resolution techniques in scientific visualization, discrete topology, geometric compression, computer graphics, computational geometry, geometric programming, and solid modeling. Valerio is the coauthor of more that eighty refereed journal and conference papers and is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. For more information see http://www.pascucci.org.
Host: Yusu Wang
