CSEM's Karen Tsai on team winning SC16 Visualization Award

CSEM's Karen Tsai was on the team who won the SC16 Scientific Visualization and Data Analytics Award with their movie describing work at Los Alamos National Laboratory that simulates an asteroid crashing into the ocean.

SC16's Scientific Visualization and Data Analytics Award went to “Visualization and Analysis of Threats from Asteroid Ocean Impacts” by a team Los Alamos National Laboratory and UT Austin. Lead author was John Patchett of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Others included Galen Gisler, Boonthanome Nouanesengsy, and David H. Rogers, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Greg Abram, Texas Advanced Computing Center; and Francesca Samsel, and Terece Turton, University of Texas at Austin.

Tsai's supervisor professor is ICES' Michael Sacks, professor of biomedical engineering.

The movie featured the grave consequences of an asteroid colliding with earth. Narrowing possible asteroid impacts to the ocean, the movie demonstrated the complex effects as the kinetic energy of the asteroid is transferred to the water as currently studied by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They use XRAGE simulations on HPC systems to understand the behavior of these ocean impacts. By running ensembles of large scale 3D simulations, they study the range of simulation variables such as angle of impact, asteroid mass, and whether or not the asteroid explodes in the atmosphere or impacts the ocean. These variables help scientists understand the magnitude of impacts such as disbursement of water into the atmosphere - where it can impact the global climate, and tsunami creation that can place population centers at risk.

SC16’s Visualization and Data Analytics Showcase Program provides a forum for the year’s most instrumental movies in high performance computing. This year, a live display was available throughout the conference for attendees to experience the latest in science and engineering visualization technologies. In addition, an SC16 session was dedicated to the best of the submissions.

Selected entries were displayed live in a museum/art gallery format and six finalists competed for the Best Visualization Award, with finalists discussing their movies in a 15-minute presentation.

Entries were judged on how their movie illuminates science, by the quality of the movie, and for innovations in the process used for creating the movie.

SC16, which stands for Supercomputing Conference 2016, is the annual international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. It is sponsored by IEEE computer society, ACM, and sighpc. This year's the 28th annual conference in Salt Lake City drew more than 11,100 registered attendees and featured a technical program spanning six days. The exhibit hall featured 349 exhibitors from industry, academia and research organizations from around the world.