Purdue University

Purdue researchers looking to get more than 1,000 words — plus some hands-on experience — related to visualizing their research results for discovery, publication and engagement will have the opportunity to do so at a two-day data visualization workshop Aug. 24-25.

The sessions are aimed at students, post-doctoral researchers, faculty and staff who want to gain skills in visualizing a variety of data types, including large volumetric data from simulation and instrumentation. The visualization workshop will take place from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days in the Envision Center, Stewart Center, Room B001, which is located off the tunnel between the Stewart Center and the Purdue Memorial Union. Space is limited, so participants should register soon. There is no cost to register

The workshop will include an introduction to visualizing various types of research data, from information contained in spreadsheets and relational databases to results from simulations covering multiple dimensions in space and time. Participants also will receive an introduction to commercial and open source software for creating illustrations, animations and visualizations as well as techniques used to visualize large data sets on high-performance computing systems.

Participants register through the National Science Foundation Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), in which Purdue is a partner. A free XSEDE account can be created on the XSEDE user portal at portal.xsede.org.

For more information about the visualization workshop at Purdue, email rcac-help@purdue.edu.

The sessions are presented through the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE), a national program for participants from almost any field, including researchers and practitioners from fields such as the physical, biological, economic and social sciences as well as engineering.

Purdue also is hosting a VSCSE-enabled workshop covering performance tuning of parallel applications on high-performance computing systems like Purdue’s community clusters on Aug. 17-21.

The workshops are delivered nationwide using high-definition video conferencing to allow students to interact in real time with course instructors from national supercomputing centers and to work in person with fellow computational scientists and local experts. At Purdue, staff from ITaP Research Computing will be on hand. VSCSE, the National Science Foundation and ITaP are the sponsors.

Stephen Harrell, the scientific application analyst who coordinates training for ITaP Research Computing, says the performance tuning and visualization workshops are just two of the research computing training events on tap at Purdue in coming months, including:

• Using Linux and Purdue’s Community Cluster Program high-performance computing systems, Sept. 8. Topics covered will range from batch submission tools and running jobs to file backups and storage.

• Parallel Programming and Optimization with Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors, Oct. 6 (seminar) and Oct. 7 (hands-on lab), sponsored by ITaP and Intel. Introductory seminar on using Intel’s Phi accelerators to speed research codes. Register here for the Oct. 6 seminar, and for the Oct. 7 lab register here. The seminar is a pre-requisite for the lab.