Technology Trends

The World Social Forum (WSF) (choose your language on the site), which ends today in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has less money to spend on computing than the World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos, Switzerland. But at both events, many different languages were spoken, meaning that simultaneous translations were an absolute necessity. If the WEF can afford professional translators and costly computers, in Porto Alegre, translators are volunteers, and the software to distribute the translations is open-source. The NIFT (Nomad Interpretation Free Tool) was already used for the 4th WSF held last year in Mumbai, India. The free software, which runs on a simple PC, collects and digitizes the translations from the interpreters before broadcasting them to a variety of devices. In fact, the technically-advanced NIFT allows for real-time streaming over the Internet of speeches in several different languages. Read more…

First, here is a short description from Babels, the international network of volunteer interpreters and translators, as told in this article from the January 2005 issue of Red Pepper (scroll towards the middle of the article).

Babels, the network of volunteer interpreters and translators, is another good example of prefigurative politics. From its birth in a squatted medieval tower in Florence to its difficult coming of age in London, Babels offers a non-market alternative to professional translation services — relying on solidarity and a massive collective effort of voluntary labour to make the Forum a space in which language diversity (and, through that, political and cultural diversity) can flourish. As such, it is a political actor within the space of the Forum and not simply a ’service provider.’

Babels was also involved in the creation of NOMAD, an international network of people, committed to putting the essential technologies into the public domain.

The aim of Nomad is to extend the GNU perspective to other technological issues, including the re-appropriation of the knowledge and the control of the technologies by the users in their digital, electronical and analogical forms. The Nomad’s sphere of activities at present ranges from communication to renewable energy.

This issue of re-appropriation of knowledge is closely linked to the political perspective of developing local production in an economy based on solidarity. The Nomad network is not a technical service provider but a political network run on a voluntary basis.

Now, let’s return to Red Pepper for a brief description of NIFT.

The Nomad Interpretation Free Tool (NIFT) combines a piece of free-software to record and transmit different translated versions of speeches, with various forms of audio transmission (such as FM radios or magnetic hearing-aid loops). To fully appreciate NIFT, it is worth thinking of it in terms of the existing professional interpretation equipment. NIFT is technically more advanced than these systems in several respects because it is fully computerised. This has positive side effects in terms of the number of different languages that can be offered simultaneously or, even more innovatively, in allowing for the real-time streaming over the internet of speeches in several different languages.

The diagram below shows the network infrastructure used at Porto Alegre (Credit: NOMAD). You can find a larger version of this image on this page.

And on this photograph taken during the preparation of the summit, you can see that the equipment used is far from being sophisticated (Credit: NOMAD). There are many other photographs available on this page.

As NIFT is an open-source project, you’ll find more technical information, including all the files if you want to use the software yourself, on this SourceForge.net page.

If you want to listen to some audio streams from the Forum, this page contains all the necessary instructions.

Finally, I didn’t find a single press review about the use of NIFT at the WSF. I just heard a 30-second airing segment on a French radio which stated that even if the translation system was cheap, the organizers didn’t have enough money to fully equip the Summit. Apparently, only 4 of the 40 rooms were equipped. If anyone has first-hand information about this particular aspect of the WSF, please post your comments below.

Sources: Roland Piquepaille, January 31, 2005; and various websites

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As the recent release of the last Top500 list reminded us last month, the most powerful computers now are reaching speeds of dozens of teraflops. When these machines run a nuclear simulation or a global climate model for days or weeks, they produce datasets of tens of terabytes. How to visualize, analyze and understand such massive amounts of data? The answer is now obvious: using Linux clusters. In this very long article, “From Seeing to Understanding,” Science & Technology Review looks at the technologies used at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which will host the IBM’s BlueGene/L next year. Visualization will be handled by a 128- or 256-node Linux cluster. Each node contains two processors sharing one graphic card. Meanwhile, the EVEREST built by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has a 35 million pixels screen piloted by a 14-node dual Opteron cluster sending images to 27 projectors. Now that Linux superclusters have almost swallowed the high-end scientific computing market, they’re building momentum in the high-end visualization one. Read more…

Let’s start with ORNL’s EVEREST.

ORNL’s EVEREST is a large-scale immersive venue for data exploration and analysis. Its screen is 30′ wide by 8′ high — comparable in size to 150 standard computer displays — and has a resolution of over 11 thousand by 3 thousand pixels, creating a total pixel space of 35 million pixels.

Below is an early version of this visualization environment. “A nanotechnology application is on the big screen, with GIS and Astrophysics on the desktops.” (Credit: ORNL)

“Visualizing and sifting through the incredible amount of information generated from massively parallel computer simulations is similar to trying to find a diamond in the desert,” said George Fann of ORNL’s Computer Science and Mathematics Division.

The power wall, dubbed EVEREST, changes that and provides a rich visual interactive experience and a highly collaborative environment for scientists to analyze their data. EVEREST makes use of commercial graphics and entertainment technologies and off-the-shelf dual-processor personal computers connected by a high-speed network to drive 27 projectors.

This is the third Linux cluster deployed at ORNL to manage the large display environments.

Now, let’s turn to LLNL. The article about the visualization efforts there is 9-page long and contains entire sections devoted to visualization advances in recent years or how the visualization process has been transformed with the arrival of powerful graphical processing unit (GPU)-equipped graphics cards.

Please read the whole article to learn more about these subjects. Here, I’ll focus only on the hardware part of the project.

Below is a powerwall in Livermore’s new Terascale Simulation Facility. “Powerwalls work by aggregating, or ’tiling,’ the separate images from many projectors (right) to create one seamless image.” (Credit: LLNL)

And here is the history of Linux clusters used for visualization at LLNL.

The first Linux visualization cluster deployed at Livermore was the Production Visualization Cluster (PVC). PVC was designed to support unclassified applications on the 11.2-teraops Multiprogrammatic Capability Resource (MCR) machine and is being expanded to support the 22.9-teraops Thunder cluster supercomputer. With 64 nodes, each consisting of two processors and a graphics card, PVC went online in 2002.

By all measures, PVC has been highly successful. It is handling data sets of 23 terabytes to create animations involving 1 billion atoms. PVC generates these animations in about one-tenth the time and at one-fifth the cost of proprietary visualization engines, while simultaneously driving high-resolution displays in conference rooms and on powerwalls.

“PVC is our model for classified ASC [Advanced Simulation and Computing program] visualization engines,” says computer scientist and VIEWS [Visual Interactive Environment for Weapons Simulation] program leader Steve Louis. The VIEWS team is preparing to deploy gViz, a 64-node cluster designed to support White, with each node consisting of two processors running at 3 gigahertz and sharing one graphics card. Similar clusters are planned to support Purple and BlueGene/L.

One important advantage of Linux cluster visualization engines is that clusters can be expanded easily. PVC is being tripled in size to support the unclassified demands brought on by Thunder. Similarly, gViz2 is a planned expansion of gViz to either 128 or 256 nodes.

The article also describes how all applications have been rewritten to run on the Linux clusters. Here is a short quote.

The new cluster software is open source, which means that the source code — the software’s programming code — is freely available on the Internet through such organizations as SourceForge. “A benefit of this approach is that the public can use our software, make improvements, and notify us if they find any bugs,” says VIEWS visualization project leader Sean Ahern.

So what is the final verdict about these Linux clusters?

The nearly unanimous opinion about the new Linux clusters is strong approval, if not downright devotion. “Users are impressed with the clusters,” says computer scientist Hank Childs, who helps DNT physicists visualize complicated simulations on PVC for unclassified, stockpile stewardship–related work. “It’s a night-and-day difference between the clusters and the older shared-memory visualization engines. Visualization programs run 10 times faster.”

Ahern notes that the increased computational horsepower of the Linux clusters allows users to run larger simulations in the same amount of time and display simulations with greater resolution. Langer notes that the clusters are proving themselves especially adept at rotating images faster than the old machines.

And what’s next? Optimization — a word almost obsolete these days!

With plans well under way to bring gViz online and retire the old visualization engines, Louis and other VIEWS managers are looking ahead to purchasing visualization clusters to support Purple and Blue Gene/L. At the same time, computer scientists are searching for ways to make the clusters process data more efficiently. “We know we’re not yet taking full advantage of the Linux clusters, especially the graphics cards,” says Louis. GPUs are so powerful that the VIEWS team and others are exploring their potential for general-purpose computing.

The VIEWS Program (recently renamed Data and Visualization Sciences) is also seeking a hardware solution to compositing. The compositing process pieces together bits of an image, each done by a separate node, into a whole. Currently performed by software, the technique could be made faster if done by a specialized card linked to each GPU.

I sincerely hope that I didn’t take too much of your time with this post, slightly longer than usual. But I think the subject deserved it.

Sources: Arnie Heller, Science & Technology Review, December 2004; and the Visualization Task Group at ORNL

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