Facilities
Requests for on-site use of the ARL DSRC Visualization facilities should be made to vis@arl.army.mil.
Hardware
The ARL DSRC provides several levels of hardware support at our facilities for cutting-edge
scientific visualization. From the systems side we have one large Linux Networx LS-V system
available as well as numerous local Linux workstations.
For more information on our larger systems, visit the Sci-Vis
Hardware page. The Video Production Suite (VPS) is
available to assist with presentations, video conversions and editing. In addition, the
ARL DSRC provides several visualization centers (as described below) to assist
customers with seeing their results in the best view possible.
Aberdeen Visualization Center
The Aberdeen Visualization Center is a 3800-square foot facility that, when opened, consolidated multiple other local visualization centers and resources into a single laboratory. The centerpiece of the AVC is a Fakespace RAVE II display system. This system, approximately 40 feet wide by 8 feet tall, features a 20-foot center fixed display panel and two 10-foot wide reconfigurable "wings" which can be rotated to change the display from a single, wide wall to a 3-sided cave-like environment. Each of the projectors onto the display have a stereo resolution of 1280x1024 pixels, and are bright enough to allow researchers to work in natural light instead of a darkened room. Powering the RAVE system is Sketch, a 64 node Linux Networx LS-V Visual Supersystem with 128 AMD dual-core processor, and 128 graphics processing units (GPU). Each node has 2 nVidia Quadro FX 4500 graphics cards, for a total of 128 graphics pipes. Each node has 16GB of memory for a system totAL OF 1 terabyte, with 8 Terabyte of globally accessible disk storage. This system achieves around 1 Billion Polygons per second.
This resource provides users of the classified Scientific Visualization facility the new capability of "distributed rendering" via EnSight DR or ParaView. Distributed Rendering takes advantage of parallel graphics resources to render enormous datasets at interactive rates to the user's workstation.
Adelphi Collaboratorium
The Adelphi Collaboratorium is a 5300-square foot facility located at the Army Research Laboratory's Adelphi Laboratory Center. Unlike the Aberdeen Visualization Center, this is not a DSRC asset, but instead an ARL facility that DSRC personnel use to assist researchers at the Adelphi location. The Collaboratorium features a 20-foot by 7-foot display and is powered by Alpha, a Linux workstation with 4 cores, 32 gigabytes of memory , and an nVidia Quadro FX 5600 video card. The Collaboratorium can be linked to the Aberdeen Visualization Center to provide real-time collaborative visualization efforts between the two sites reducing the need to travel for briefings at one location.
Area 321
Another facility that is an Army Research Laboratory asset but used by DSRC staff is a facility
known as Area 321. Area 321 is being developed as a Augmented Virtuality Scientific Data Center that
will assist in the investigation of physics based simulations. The term "Augmented
Virtuality" identifies systems which are primarily synthetic with some real-world imagery added
to the virtual objects. Area 321 consists mostly of commodity components and locally developed
solutions to bring the system together. The results of these techniques in this system are to
provide an understanding to the researcher of complex relationships between reality and computed
values.