A Cluster Infrastructure to Support Retrieval, Management and Visualization of Massive Amounts of Data

该项目为数据密集型应用程序开发基础设施，旨在建立集群和显示墙基础设施，以促进在各种情况下支持海量数据的检索、查询、建模和可视化的系统的实验研究。该基础设施包括具有图形功能的工作站集群和快速网络基础设施、高分辨率显示墙和专用文件服务器，支持三个研究项目：利用隐藏网络、大科学可视化和建模与渲染大型3D环境。第一个项目搜索、索引和查询隐藏的Web数据。通常，通过超链接访问页面的爬虫在不搜索单个站点的情况下无法找到所需的信息。该项目开发了使爬虫能够在隐藏页面中导航的技术，构建了一个允许查询这些数据的搜索引擎。第二个涉及适用于非常大的科学数据集的可视化技术的发展。这项研究包括开发用于科学可视化的内核外算法、并行图形和可伸缩显示技术、新的渲染算法以及更好的可视化建模原语。该项目希望建立可视化系统，有效地将可视化需求与可用的硬件资源分离，允许在任何合理的设备上可视化任意大的数据集。第三个项目着眼于真实世界对象和场景的模型，娱乐、培训和模拟、特效、法医记录分析、远程呈现和远程漫游等应用程序可以从中受益。这项工作需要解决与注册和清理原始数据相关的昂贵的优化问题，以及用于实时渲染的高分辨率显示。这种基础设施使可视化、几何计算和网络数据库实验室的建立成为可能，这反过来将使许多学生受益。已经建立了一个外展部分；这项研究目前支持几名妇女和少数群体。此外，两个新的相关课程正在开发中。

This project, developing an infrastructure for data intensive applications, aims at establishing a cluster and display-wall infrastructure to facilitate experimental research in systems that support retrieval, querying, modeling, and visualization of massive amounts of data in a broad range of scenarios. The infrastructure, consisting of a cluster of graphics-capable workstation with fast network infrastructure, a high-resolution display wall, and a dedicated file server, supports three research projects: Exploiting the Hidden Web, Large Scientific Visualization, and Modeling and Rendering Large 3D Environments.The first project searches, indexes, and queries the hidden Web data. Often crawlers, which visit pages by following hyperlinks, cannot find needed information without searching the individual sites. This project develops techniques to enable a crawler to navigate through hidden pages, building a search engine that allows these data to be queried. The second relates to the development of visualization technology that is suitable for very large scientific datasets. This research includes the development of out-of-core algorithms for scientific visualization, parallel graphics and scalable-display technology, novel rendering algorithms, and better visualization modeling primitives. The project expects to build visualization systems that effectively decouple the visualization requirements from the available hardware resources, allowing visualization of arbitrarily large datasets on any reasonable device. The third project looks into models of real-world objects and scenes from which applications such as entertaining, training and simulation, special effects, analysis of forensic records, telepresence, and remote walkthroughs can benefit. This work requires tackling expensive optimization problems related to registering and cleaning raw data, and high-resolution display for real-time rendering.This infrastructure enables the establishing of a lab in Visualization and Geometric Computing and WebDB; which in turn will benefit many students. An outreach component is in place; the research currently supports several female and minorities. Moreover, two new related courses are under development