SC 740 Presentation Review

 By Deborah Dent

Collaborative Scientific Visualization

Presented by

Scott Klasky

Syracuse University

NPAC

Syracuse, New York

September 24, 1997

Dr. Klasky presented a very interesting and informative presentation on a scientific visualization package, which has been implemented with Java. A few months ago I was able to hear a presentation by Jeffry Fox on a similar topic and he made the statement that Java was going to be THE language for scientific computing, replacing FORTRAN. We were amazed at his statement because up to that point, I only looked as Java as being a language used to develop Web applications. Now we have Dr. Klasky making the same statement.

Dr. Klasky began his presentation with a description of Java and stated that it points along the lines of C++. It is an interpretive object oriented language. One source of it power comes from the fact that is portable because it is interpretive and can be used for collaboration. There are also many nice tools available for use with Java (no re-inventing the wheel). The main point is it operates well in parallel environments.

Dr. Klasky then proceeded to present information about a collaborative scientific visualization package - SCIVIS. This is a client server data visualization analysis system that takes full advantage of Java. The client is a sophisticated Java applications which allow the user to visualize 1D, 2D, vector, and isosurface data set(s). The data can be sent to and retrieved from any server where the socket is supported thus allowing this application to be used also as a front-end to other applications on the server.

I was impressed with the demo and how the application allowed different views of the data. I see this feature as being a cost and time saver when analyzing data. The fact that the system is collaborative is also interesting. That way several researchers can analyze the data simultaneously.

As for Java replacing FORTRAN, we will have to wait and see. When I left undergraduate school back in the late 70's, my instructors were saying PL/1 was going to replace FORTRAN. When I started working, the scientist that were using FORTRAN laughed at me then, laughed when we tried to switch to C, then Ada. I will keep quit this time!