MRI: Development of Augmentarium: High Performance Visual Computing Infrastructure with Adaptive Displays

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This project, developing Augmentarium, enables visual understanding of a number of applications in science, engineering, and medicine. Once completed, this instrument is expected to be a stable shared-used cyberfacility that uses the emerging technologies of programmable-robot-mounted projector-camera pairs for high-performance computing and scientific applications with extensive visualization needs. The developed instrument provides unprecedented capabilities to visualize locally high-resolution images with lower-resolution context, new interaction modalities, and projection-based augmented reality. The Augmentarium development will proceed with close involvement of domain experts in a number of areas including Astronomy, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Biology, Materials Science, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science. It is also anticipated that this will attract and involve a number of international collaborations. The projects that can directly benefit from the proposed instrument include: - Understanding Large-Scale Astronomy Data - Multiscale Instabilties and Mixing Processes in the Atmosphere and the Oceans - Large Scale Characterization of Stem Cell Colonies and Material Properties - Large Scale Simulations in Fluid Dynamics and Macromolecular Reconstruction via Fast Multipole Accelerated Algorithms - Real-Time Data Visualization for Cyber Security - Analysis and Visualization of Large Streaming Data The proposed instrumentation is expected to advance the state of the art in a broad range of scientific and engineering disciplines, such as astrophysics, modeling of cosmological processes, modeling and simulation of biological systems, climate change, computational engineering, materials science, and high performance computing. The proposed infrastructure will be used for education and research training by the different research groups affiliated with the main research areas. The facility will also be used to operate a summer program designed to interest students in computing, particularly those from groups under-represented in computing. This cyberfacility will also reach out to the Women in Engineering Society, the Association of Women in Computing, and the Society of Black Engineers at the University of Maryland to encourage participation in computational science projects that will make use of the new facility.