The scientific applications at VACET are producing new science in the domains of climate, fusion, astro, etc. The goal is to leverage sci-vis and analytics software technology as an enabling technology for enabling scientific insight.

VACET is partnering with the big National Laboratories such as Lawrence Livermoore, Berkeley and Oak Ridge, as well as with the University of California at Davis. The accomplishments are having an enormous science impact and have resulted in production-quality, petascale capable software infrastructure, field-leading, award-winning research, progress towards petascale and effective use of ASCR computing.

The science impact has led to new visualization R&D which produces the ability to quantify and display new phenomena never before seen. It also leads to cost savings since communities and individuals adopt VACET technology allowing them to borrow or buy rather than build their own facilities, explained Dr. Hansen. Next, it is

improving efficiency of knowledge discovery by reducing time-to-solution, leveraging parallel computing platforms, and delivering new capabilities in a familiar form.

The VACET research portfolio is being driven by stakeholder needs. VACET holds in store techniques for large data visualization; scalable visualization; flow visualization; and feature detection with analysis and tracking.

Dr. Hansen also announced progress towards petascale at VACET by helping the Department of Energy (DOE) show effective use of petascale platforms and by creating effective tools and techniques for visual data analysis of data being produced by petascale applications on petascale platforms.

The following tools have been developed:

• SCIRun at http://www.sci.utah.edu
• VIS Trails at http://www.vistrails.org
• Manta Ray Tracint

C-SAFE is being used to model combustion and to study the impact of explosions.

Yet another example cited by Dr. Hansen is the Visible Male where there is a need for High Resolution Visualization.

The Tuvok Volume Rendering Engine is a VACET achievement as well. Tuvok is a production quality, high performance software. Version 1.0 has been released in May 2009.

VACET has successfully brought to development multiple tools but there is still much to do, warned Dr. Hansen.

Future work consists in applying visualization methods to AMR; parallel flow visualization; multi-dimensional techniques; FTLE flow methods; uncertainty and error visual representation; and cluster-based volume rendering within Visit.

Other challenges to meet with VACET are multi-scale collaborative interfaces accessing shared data sources; distributed storage; data availability; stream processing; and scalable infrastructure for heterogeneous resources.

More information is available at the VACET website.