SDSC and NCSA create spectacular animation for Hayden Planetarium's new show

Narrated by Harrison Ford, the 23-minute space theater presentation examines the possibility of life on other worlds. The eight-minute animation segment, created through the collaboration of visualisation experts at SDSC, scientists and artists at the Hayden Planetarium, and computer graphics specialists at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), shows the formation of the Sun and its family of planets from a nebula of dust and gas, with millions of years of real time compressed into seconds.

The animation sequence starts outside the Milky Way galaxy and zooms toward a nebula in which stars are forming. Swirling dust and gas condense into protostars. The largest protostar "ignites" in hydrogen fusion; its brilliant blue-white light energises gas in the nebula, causing an eerie red and green glow. The view shifts to a smaller newborn star with a thick disk of dust and gas orbiting the star's equator and jets of material streaming from its poles. The star brightens, the disk flattens, and dust and gas accrete into lumps, infant planets. One of them becomes Earth.

"The Hayden animation team used state-of-the-art graphics techniques that can only be done on supercomputers", stated SDSC visualisation expert David R. Nadeau. "We've taken great care to keep the visualisation both true to the science and entertaining for the audience. The result is what scientists believe you'd really see if you could fly around and into these amazing astronomical phenomena."

The animated segment rendered by SDSC was assembled as 42,000 high-resolution video frames, selected from more than 150,000 images created in the course of the effort. SDSC visualisation programmer Erik Engquist and Nadeau developed custom software for rendering three-dimensional data to meet the planetarium's unique requirements. The rendering of these images occupied more than 1000 processors of SDSC's Blue Horizon, one of the world's largest supercomputers, for more than five days.

"The Search for Life" was produced by Anthony Braun of the American Museum of Natural History. Carter Emmart, director of visualisation for the Hayden Planetarium, guided the course of the development effort. The computer simulation of the formation of the nebula was the work of Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, an astrophysicist at the Hayden Planetarium. Science visualiser Ryan Wyatt of the American Museum of Natural History programmed the simulation of star motion. John Hawley of the University of Virginia created the protoplanetary disk simulation.

Key personnel at NCSA included Donna Cox, senior researcher and a professor in the University of Illinois School of Art and Design, visualisation programmer Robert Patterson, and senior research programmer Stuart Levy. The work of the visualisation artists at NCSA was integrated into the show through a process of remote virtual collaboration, using NCSA's Virtual Director software. To define the "flight path" for the sequence, Patterson, Cox, and Levy ran Virtual Director in the CAVE, a virtual reality display system at NCSA, and Emmart's team in New York ran Virtual Director on the Hayden's Digital Dome system, enabling the two groups to interactively refine the camera viewpoints and resolve production issues.

Each participant in the process was represented as a graphical avatar in order to determine their locations in the dataset. Each avatar could freely move through the data or attach to the flight path. Levy handled data conversions and interface issues. His software PartiView was connected directly to Virtual Director so the teams could preview representations of the simulation data in real time and Levy could alter the data representations on both display systems as needed. In addition, Patterson was able to connect directly to the Hayden's display system and make changes to the choreography from the New York user's point of view.

The simulation and rendering data for the animation sequence was transferred between the three sites over the high-speed Abilene research network, run by the Internet2 project. The data files were stored and managed at SDSC. With nearly three terabytes - three million megabytes - of data to share and manage among the sites, the SDSC Storage Resource Broker, which provides a way to access data resources anywhere on the Net without regard to their physical locations, proved essential. George Kremenek of SDSC's Data and Knowledge Systems group played a key role in the data management.

In total, the animation segment consists of 70,000 high-resolution frames, counting additional portions rendered by NCSA and Hayden Planetarium programmers, scientists, and artists. The planetarium projects seven of these frames at a time onto the dome and blends them together to create a seamless, wrap-around image.