• Music Meets Art in 3d
• From the Director
• New And Upgraded Hardware at ARSC
• Remote Control Driving

Music Meets Art in 3D

What does an old 19th century zinc-lined bathtub connected to a small induction coil have in common with creating art and music in the 21st century?

In 1874, inventor Elisha Gray, probably the first person to produce electronic notes, created what he called a “physiological receiver.” By connecting one end of an induction coil to a dry zinc-lined bathtub, and holding the other end in one hand, Gray used his free hand to vigorously rub the zinc bathtub lining to create a sound. When he rubbed his hand faster and harder on the zinc, he created louder sounds.

Back then, it was a little more crude for Gray than it is for today’s musicians. Now, folks like Scott Deal, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Music Department, can easily create good vibrations and make music with their hands and electricity using modern electronic keyboards.

In February 2005, the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) provided the Discovery Lab for a setting where Deal joined his creative musical innovations with the 3D computer-generated (CG) art of Miho Aoki, ARSC/UAF Art Department professor, to produce a virtual art and music concert.

Deal supplied live music on his marimba, in combination with previously recorded electronic music. Aoki created the real-time CG art to flow in synchronization with Deal’s music. Using stereoptic eyeglasses, the Discovery Lab audience enjoyed the harmonic tones of the marimba, while immersed in a stark 3D landscape of Fairbanks environs in winter.

Working together since 2001 on various multi-media projects, Deal and Aoki create a blending of music, graphics and visuals that go beyond simply merging the physical live and virtual gestures. Using 3D, the two were able to create a world in which the audience was able to fully immerse themselves in the flow of the music and the art.

Expanding their collaboration, Aoki and Deal participated in the April 2005 Art on the Grid event, InterPlay: Loose Minds in a Box, via the Access Grid (AG) high-bandwidth networking system. Multimedia Specialist Jimmy Miklavec directed the event from his site at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

InterPlay is a multi-faceted event that merges six simultaneous performances from around the country via the AG. The live performances incorporate theater, music, performance art, computer-generated art, virtual reality and motion caption, which are combined, digitized, encoded and streamed onto the network.

[Back to Top]

From the Director

Spring in Fairbanks is a rush of activity. While the snow melts outside and the grass begins to green, Fairbanks busies itself with preparations for the endless light and goings-on of summer. This energy always seems to feed the pace of activities at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center. Each summer we host an endless stream of visitors who bring exciting energy and creativity to our center and propel us towards new projects and ideas. This year is no different.

We started off the spring season with our usual bustle of local school tours. This year, hundreds of Fairbanks’ and rural Alaska’s brightest young minds had the opportunity to experience science and virtual reality in our Discovery Lab. The highlights of this were the center’s participation in UAF’s first “I’m Going to College” tour to encourage sixth graders to begin thinking about college as they graduate into junior high school and the Experience Science—Expect a Challenge day-long event for local Girl Scout troops to encourage young women’s interest in science. Both of these events allowed ARSC to reach out to the community and hopefully inspire a few budding computational scientists.

June will also mark several events for us including a visit from Project Gutenberg’s Michael Hart, our annual First Friday Art Opening in the Discovery Lab, the beginning of summer public tours and the arrival of our National Science Foundation and military academy interns. Additionally, several George Washington University students from that institution’s High Performance Computing Lab will be visiting the center to build research collaborations between the two centers in the study of Unified Parallel C and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology.

All the while, the center has completed an intensive year of review and Phase I Strategic Planning, setting the stage for continued investment in computational science, and the results of these investments are already beginning to pay off. In just the last few months, researchers at the center have been working to support the creation of a global tsunami model. It’s these kinds of contributions that we as a center hope to continue making to the field of computational science and research. We look forward to another invigorating summer that will lead us into an even more productive fall. [Back to Top]

New and Upgraded Hardware at ARSC

Since the retirement of older ARSC supercomputers, the center’s machine room is rapidly filling in the open slots with some new systems.

Cray XD1

Tarek El-Ghazawi, of George Washington University, along with five of his graduate students, is spending part of the summer at ARSC doing some customizable configuring of the logic blocks on the center’s new Cray XD1, Nelchina.
Their focus is to work with the Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which is a programmable logic chip. An FPGA is similar to a programmable logic device (PLD), but whereas PLDs are generally limited to hundreds of gates, FPGAs support thousands of gates, which provide significantly more programmable interconnects and switches between logic blocks.
The system El-Ghazawi and his students will use, Nelchina, arrived at ARSC on May 9, 2005. It is a three-chassis system with each chassis consisting of 12 AMD Opteron™ processors in six nodes. Opteron™ is a new architecture to ARSC. The high-speed interconnect makes it operate more like a Cray than a Linux cluster. Nelchina’s Direct Connected Processor (DCP) architecture harnesses many processors into a single unified system.
Cray’s implementation of the DCP architecture optimizes message-passing applications by directly linking processors to each other through a high performance interconnect fabric, eliminating shared memory contention and peripheral component interconnect (PCI) bus bottlenecks.

IBM Image Generator

ARSC’s new IBM image generator cluster, VizDog, is up and running. VizDog is a dual-boot Linux and Windows system with seven two-processor nodes that drive the four-wall stereo display in the Discovery Lab. Many of the applications currently running on the SGI Onyx 3200 system, Igie, will also run on VizDog, as well as a suite of new software that will advantage ARSC visualization users.
Additionally, this new system allows students and researchers to do their computing on readily available hardware. Another advantage is the numerous public applications that are available for a Windows platform, like Amira, which is a 3D scientific visualization application that is reasonably easy to use. Suitable for the advanced finite-element simulations of physics, biology, engineering and medicine, Amira can generate true volumetric tetrahedral meshes. Max/MSP and Jitter are real-time audio and video synthesis and analysis programs used by professional musicians.
“I think this is an exciting environment for researchers and students, and we should encourage them to try it out,” says Bill Brody, ARSC visualization specialist. Now users have more choices as to which system they prefer to work on – Unix on Igie, and Windows and Linux on VizDog.

Sun PC Cluster

The new Sun PC Cluster, Cerebro, with six dual AMD Opteron™ nodes, has replaced ARSC’s HP Titanium 2 Cluster, Fang. Running the Rocks Linux cluster toolkit, it provides a stable and cost-effective system that makes cluster computers easier to manage, maintain and administer.
Cerebro opens a new door for users who have exhausted their resources running codes on desktop systems or departmental servers, but aren’t quite ready run their codes on the bigger supercomputers.
For more information about setting up an account on ARSC systems, send an email to consult@arsc.edu. [Back to Top]

Remote Control Driving

Driving a car located on a racetrack in Hawaii, while sitting 3,000 miles away at a laptop in ARSC’s Discovery Lab in Fairbanks, Alaska, probably sets a new record for long-distance driving.
Nozomu Nishinago, a representative of the Japanese government’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, came to the University of Alaska Fairbanks to experiment with the efficiency of transferring High Definition Television signals over the internet.
To make his experiment a little more interesting, he linked, via Internet 2, with a group attending a technology expo in Hawaii, and connected to a remote-controlled car containing a miniature wireless camera. A real-time image coming from the car’s camera was projected onto one of the Discovery Lab’s 10-by-8-foot screens. The driver, sitting at a laptop equipped with a steering wheel and pedals in the lab, controlled the movement of the car on the racetrack in Hawaii.
Another live, high-definition image, one with four times the resolution of normal television, was projected onto a second 10-by-8-foot screen showing the racetrack, the cars and the people watching.
“As the driver here steered the wheel, you could see the driver’s view from inside the car on one screen, and the whole racetrack with the car making the responsive turn on the other,” said Nathan Bills, ARSC Network Specialist. “There was only about a one-second delay between the two.” [Back to Top]