Load-balanced parallel streamline generation on large scale vector fields

Because of the ever increasing size of output data from scientific simulations, supercomputers are increasingly relied upon to generate visualizations. One use of supercomputers is to generate field lines from large scale flow fields. When generating field lines in parallel, the vector field is generally decomposed into blocks, which are then assigned to processors. Since various regions of the vector field can have different flow complexity, processors will require varying amounts of computation time to trace their particles, causing load imbalance, and thus limiting the performance speedup. To achieve load-balanced streamline generation, we propose a workload-aware partitioning algorithm to decompose the vector field into partitions with near equal workloads. Since actual workloads are unknown beforehand, we propose a workload estimation algorithm to predict the workload in the local vector field. A graph-based representation of the vector field is employed to generate these estimates. Once the workloads have been estimated, our partitioning algorithm is hierarchically applied to distribute the workload to all partitions. We examine the performance of our workload estimation and workload-aware partitioning algorithm in several timings studies, which demonstrates that by employing these methods, better scalability can be achieved with little overhead.     

Classification and Uncertainty Visualization of Dendritic Spines from Optical Microscopy Imaging

Neuronal dendrites and their spines affect the connectivity of neural networks, and play a significant role in many neurological conditions. Neuronal function is observed to be closely correlated with the appearance, disappearance and morphology of the spines. Automatic 3‐D reconstruction of neurons from light microscopy images, followed by the identification, classification and visualization of dendritic spines is therefore essential for studying neuronal physiology and biophysical properties. In this paper, we present a method to reconstruct dendrites using a surface representation of the dendrite. The 1‐D skeleton of the dendritic surface is then extracted by a medial geodesic function that is robust and topologically correct. This is followed by a Bayesian identification and classification of the spines. The dendrite and spines are visualized in a manner that displays the spines' types and the inherent uncertainty in identification and classification. We also describe a user study conducted to validate the accuracy of the classification and the efficacy of the visualization.     

Visual Analysis of Brain Activity from fMRI Data

Classically, analysis of the time-varying data acquired during fMRI experiments is done using static activation maps obtained by testing voxels for the presence of significant activity using statistical methods. The models used in these analysis methods have a number of parameters, which profoundly impact the detection of active brain areas. Also, it is hard to study the temporal dependencies and cascading effects of brain activation from these static maps. In this paper, we propose a methodology to visually analyze the time dimension of brain function with a minimum amount of processing, allowing neurologists to verify the correctness of the analysis results, and develop a better understanding of temporal characteristics of the functional behaviour. The system allows studying time-series data through specific volumes-of-interest in the brain-cortex, the selection of which is guided by a hierarchical clustering algorithm performed in the wavelet domain. We also demonstrate the utility of this tool by presenting results on a real data-set.