RAVE On: The Research and Visualization Environment is now open for business!

By Dr. Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, Assistant Director - Academic Computing and User Services and Dr. Jesse Hamner, Manager, Research and Visualization Environment (RAVE)

Last October we announced in Benchmarks Online, the construction of the UNT Research And Visualization Environment (RAVE) to enhance research at the University. The facility is now open for business and scholarly work has begun. The RAVE provides an important research function at UNT in answer to two primary issues:

• The 21st century has brought the ability to generate overwhelming amounts of data; these data, while useful, must still be examined and understood.
  
  
  
  • Images (photographic) can now be upwards of 200 Megapixels (five times larger than even the RAVE's 12-display array can show at full resolution)
  • Users are presented with an unpleasant choice: either view the image and lose the detail, or see the detail and lose the overall image
  • Supercomputer output can be similarly expansive -- again, would you like to see a display of one quarter of your output, or would you like to see everything and risk missing a small but potentially important variation?


• Since data collection began, explaining data, analyses, and results has never been easy.
  
  
  
  • No one cares about columns of numbers, and even accurate coefficients can be misleading to the end user
  • Grants, manuscripts, and conference presentations require visual and substantive impact on the reader

The goal of the RAVE is to provide excellent computer resources for graphically intensive research, simulations, statistics, and design. Specific software requests are accommodated as much as possible, within fiscal constraints, and custom scripting and programming is available on a limited basis and at the discretion of the staff. Primarily the facility serves researchers who wish to use and learn its resources on their own. RAVE staff mainly consult with these scholars on best practices for clear and graphical output of data analysis such as statistical results, informative display of research project results, page and poster layout, and refinement of photo images and graphics. The RAVE utilizes a 49-Megapixel display for examination and large-scale analysis and output of graphical data and provides superior graphical output capability to better display and explain research elements.

The video wall of the RAVE allows for clear viewing of data

Initial users of the RAVE have been from diverse areas including materials engineering, political science and information science. Other users have included graduate students who need access to specific software and powerful workstations housed in the facility and also university community members with specific research printing and design needs that cannot be solved with other resources on campus. The following lists provide an outline of current hardware and software equipment and services:

Hardware:

• Three 8-core workstations: ( Dell T5500 / Dual Quad Core Processor 2.93 ghz/24 gb RAM/320 GB SATA/Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 with 64-bit Windows 7)
• One quad-core Mac workstation: ((Mac Pro 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 8GB (4x2GB) 640GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB )
• A 12-display video wall and cluster (Master Node: PowerEdge R710 2xQC 2.26Ghz,24GB RAM,2x146GB SAS R1, 3x1TB SATA R5, DVD+RW,Rdnt PS,RH 5.2/Precision R5400, 2xQC 2.66GHz, 16GB RAM, 250GB SATA, 2x512MB QUADRO FX1700, DVD+RW, RH WS 4.5/ Dell 3008WFP-HC
• A 64-inch color printer (Epson Stylus Pro 11880)
• A smaller color printer (Dell 2130cn)

Applications:

• TecPlot 360/2009 -- all platforms
• Abaqus -- Windows (64 bit)
• Geomagic Studio -- Windows (64 bit)
• Geomagic Qualify -- Windows (64 bit)
• Ansys 64 -- Windows (64)
• Pro/Engineer -- Windows (64)
• Matlab -- all platforms
• ArcGIS -- Windows (64)
• R -- all platforms
• Stata 11 -- Win/Mac

also:

• VMD
• GRASS GIS
• ATOMEYE
• WinSCP
• jEdit
• Notepad++
• TexLive: LyX, JabRef, TeXWorks etc.
• CYGWIN
• RasMol

Other software that has been requested includes Materials Studio, Gaussian, ELPoly, MolPro, Molden, GAMESS-US and GAMESS-UK. Much of this software is quite costly and must be considered on a case-by-case basis but suggestions are most welcome! The RAVE currently has the following business hours: 1 PM - 5 PM, Monday - Friday and these hours will expand in the future as needs dictate. Limited appointments can also be made for special service with advanced notice.

The following are policies and procedures that have been enacted with this initial launch:

The facility is open to:

• Faculty and graduate students with a specific need for software or hardware provided in the RAVE
• Undergraduates doing research for a faculty member who specifically requests access to the software and/or hardware in the RAVE that is not available elsewhere on campus

Printer usage and charging policies:

• Epson 11880: printing by appointment
• $20 per foot or fraction thereof on any media we provide, $15 per foot on media clients provide
• Image formats (TIFF, JPEG) and Photoshop format are strongly preferred, as other formats -- including PDF -- often have problems (Microsoft Publisher format is explicitly not supported)
• RAVE staff will make no edits to documents save to orient the document for most efficient use of paper
• Payment by IDO only -- no cash, checks, etc.
• If color space is not specified, the RAVE prints using CMYK
• Print-ready images brought to the lab before 3:30 PM may be printed that day
• Some files will not be print ready and may require several consulting iterations with RAVE staff.
• Print-ready images received after that 3:30 PM will be printed the following business morning and ready by noon.

The Epson 11880 provides impressive displays for research presentations

Future plans and expansion of the facility include Windows 7 virtualization and WINE-based Windows application support on the display cluster, client base and temporal coverage expansion, interchanges / collaboration with other visualization labs on campus, and tight links to the Talon supercomputer. Queries about the RAVE should be sent to Dr. Jesse Hamner at jesse.hamner@unt.edu.