Seeing the Big Picture

“Here at the Visualization Center, we’re not interested in building something just to see if we can do it,” says Dr. Graham Kent, research geophysicist and director of the Visualization Center at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). “A successful technology project for us is one that yields immediate and tangible results for our scientists. We support the scientists at SIO by providing the tools they need to do better collaborative science among themselves and with scientists elsewhere, and to share scientific information with the larger community.”

The most recent addition to SIO’s visualization infrastructure is iCluster, a 50-megapixel “wall of information” comprising 12 Apple Cinema Displays driven by six Power Mac G5 systems running open source graphics middleware developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL). The iCluster project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) EarthScope program’s USArray Network Facility (USANF) and the Real-time Observatories, Applications, and Data management Network (ROADNet, also NSF-funded) at SIO/UCSD, with the collaboration of UCSD’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

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