Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Seeing the Big Picture

Better Viewing

“When we bring in a news crew right after an earthquake, they get a visceral reaction from the wall,” says Kent. “There’s a different relationship to the display when we can put up 50 megapixels of different kinds of data up there simultaneously in bright, flicker-free, perfect color, whether it’s still images or full-motion video. When it comes to that kind of versatility at that scale of resolution, the Apple Cinema Displays are in a class by themselves.”

Beyond their camera-friendliness, the Apple Cinema Displays allow the scientists to see both the big picture from a couple of yards away and the minute detail when they move closer. “We call it ‘walking zoom’,” Kent explains. “By replacing artificial image manipulation metaphors with the kinetic ones, we’re able to remove some of the barriers that technology can unintentionally place between scientists and their data.”

“With a ratio of 240 machines to one fulltime system administrator, we’re living proof that the total cost of ownership of a Mac is amazingly low.”

Security, Flexibility, and Ease of Use

The tight integration of the Mac hardware and the UNIX-based Mac OS X software, with its full suite of open source tools, meant that the team could devote all of its time to developing new functionality — a real productivity booster.

“The Mac is simple to use, simple to set up, and simple to network,” says one of the system users, post-doctoral researcher Dr. Kerry Key. “I like having both the easy-to-use graphical desktop and the underlying UNIX-based operating system right at my fingertips. With the Mac, I can continue to run my FORTRAN workhorse routines and shell scripts from a terminal window, keeping my scientific code simple and platform-independent, while simultaneously on the same machine I can use commercial software for plotting charts, creating presentations, and word processing.”

Wayne Chen, the facility’s system administrator, adds: “While the scientists may have picked Mac OS X for its UNIX-based foundation, we IT folks love it for the security and ease of management it provides. With a ratio of 240 machines to one fulltime system administrator, we’re living proof that the total cost of ownership of a Mac is amazingly low, whether you’re talking about the PowerBooks we all carry around, the Xserve and Xserve RAID hardware that comprises our enterprise infrastructure, or the Power Mac backend for the iCluster.”

“We had several viable architectures to choose from to build the iCluster,” Nayak adds. “We chose the one we thought would give us the best performance with the least development effort and we were certainly not disappointed. The fact that the best choice for performance also turned out to be extremely cost-effective was just an unexpected bit of good luck.”

Total Control with Apple Remote Desktop

As the iCluster administrator, Nayak uses Apple Remote Desktop 2 to simplify system configuration and administration. This desktop management solution takes the legwork out of the iCluster’s administrative tasks by allowing Nayak to execute UNIX shell scripts or commands on any number of the display nodes at one time. Using remote shell scripts, he can use command-line tools to initialize the cluster, or he can remotely access any system’s desktop to manage it directly. This is especially useful when the iCluster is used as a giant command-and-control panel.

“Of course there are times when we want to display one image or application across all 12 of the iCluster’s tiled Apple Cinema Displays,” Nayak says. “But day in and day out, the way we use the iCluster most is to provide a status display of all of our key data sources. You can scan the larger dashboard readouts for a quick status check and if anything catches your eye, step closer to examine the detailed data in one of the dozens of web pages, data windows, and streaming media feeds the iCluster can display simultaneously. Apple Remote Desktop 2 makes it easy for me to tailor the display to our exact needs from wherever I happen to be.”

Science and Technology in Partnership

Because effective scientific visualization tools are critical factors in so many areas of scientific endeavor, the members of the SIO Visualization Center view the iCluster project as one step in a long process. “There will come a day when we can manufacture seamless gigapixel display walls,” says Kent. “We will freely interact with multiple 100 gigabit data streams originating at networked sensors and computing clusters all over Earth and in space.”

But before that day comes, scientists and engineers will need to work through hundreds of projects, each of which, like iCluster, advances the state of the art in its specific domain of the overall visualization field.

“In the meantime, each of those incremental advances offers immediate benefits that our scientists can use to do better science and to communicate their insights better,” Kent says. He has already used iCluster to present his seismological research results, as has his colleague, SIO seismologist Dr. Debi Kilb, the science director of the Visualization Center.

Coping with Nature

For the Earth scientists at SIO, the bottom line is firmly grounded in practical realities. The science, sensor networks, and visualization systems are all part of an overall focus on understanding — and coping with — the forces of nature. “No matter how abstract the theoretical work becomes, it is grounded in mechanical forces working on a planetary scale,” Kent muses. “The probability of a large earthquake in Southern California is high. When it comes, visualization tools like iCluster will help us assess the impact, allocate resources, and hopefully mitigate the additional loss of lives.”

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