The Visualization Laboratory offers a variety of specialized equipment and technical resources which give researchers the ability to analyze data and information in novel ways offering insights unattainable through other means.

The Visualization Laboratory also offers to the teaching community of the UPR system, the opportunity to develop visually-based course material and access to state-of-the-art facilities for research-based hands-on teaching.

The Visualization Laboratory is distributed in a small number of physical locations, maximizing the availability of space, resources, and specific research expertise within various departments.

The three constituents of the distributed facility are:

• a Visualization Resources Development Center and Teaching Laboratory, located on the ground floor of the Monzon building in the Mayagüez campus
• a Scientific Visualization Center located on the ground floor of the Chemistry building in the Mayagüez campus
• a Scientific Visualization Center located at the main offices of the High Performance Computing facility

Significant visualization resources are present at all sites, tailored to the needs of the surrounding communities.

At the core of the main Visualization Laboratory is a Silicon Graphics Onyx2 visualization supercomputer, which is presently physically integrated within the main supercomputer of the HPCf. The visualization and graphics capabilities are offered by two InfiniteReality2 graphics pipes, each with a single Raster Manager and 64Mbytes of texture memory and a wide variety of I/O interfaces. A variety of open- and closed-source software are presently being evaluated and installed on the Onyx2. This software performs such tasks as scientific visualization of multidimensional data sets, architectural and engineering modeling and animations, GIS and digital audio/video editing.

A significant software environment recently implemented within the main VizLab facility is that of Silicon Graphics' VizServer.

Vizserver enables our Onyx2 visualization supercomputer to distribute collaborative visualization sessions to client systems running a mix of desktop operating systems. The Onyx2 system can support concurrent, real-time processing of complex 3D graphics, rich 2D imagery, and ultrahigh-resolution video. With OpenGL Vizserver, graphics processing is handled entirely on the Onyx2 system; the client machine simply decompresses and displays the image.

An on-going collaboration with the Metaverse Lab of the University of Kentucky will soon bring a room devoted to a large-screen multi-projection rendering system powered by a Linux cluster with the use of high-end 3D video cards.

This project, called VIBE (Visually Immersive Blended Environment ), uses commodity off-the-shelf components to create functionality similar to that of mainstream technology such as ImmersaDesks or CAVEs.

A demonstration of this project is currently being built at the main location of the HPCf. We are interested in demonstrating the technology to any research, department or school which would be interested in implementing such a high resolution visualization environment. Please contact us for more information.

The Visualization Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico has been supported through grant (NSF-9977805) from the National Science Foundation