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GCN Home > August 27, 2001 issue

NIST team sees in stereo

By Patricia Daukantas, GCN Staff

Visualization setup lets researchers walk through concrete

A team of computer scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology is inventing new ways to study the most common—and the rarest—substances on Earth.
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The aim of the visualizations is to improve research, NIST’s Judith E. Devaney says.

The scientists specialize in visualization techniques to show their colleagues in physics and materials science the results of complex simulations running on powerful parallel computers.

They can image, for example, random movements of particles inside wet co
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NIST’s Peter M. Ketcham views a 3-D simulation of a Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter in which a cluster of supercold atoms starts to behave as a single entity.
ncrete. They can picture small knots of atoms in a state of matter so unusual that it wasn’t created in the laboratory until 70 years after theorists predicted it.

On the surface, the scientific collaborations appear very different, said Judith E. Devaney, leader of the Scientific Applications and Visualization Group at NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory in Gaithersburg, Md. But the specialties—parallel computing, data mining and visualization—are alike because all involve pattern recognition.

Math foundation

Scientists at other NIST labs in Gaithersburg and Boulder, Colo., devise the basic algorithms for the virtual experiments. Programmers in Devaney’s group convert the models to detailed programs for NIST’s parallel computers. Then the visualization specialists transform the data sets into pictures or movies for easier understanding.

Devaney and her colleagues regard the process as a feedback loop that proceeds from theory through development of a basic model, sometimes altering the theory.

“It’s a fairly tight loop because the goal is always to have more realistic models,” Devaney said. “You want to make sure the scientists get what they need so they can move on to the next step.”

Devaney’s group collaborates with NIST’s Building and Fire Research Laboratory to study concrete, the most widely used manmade product.

The building research lab recently organized a consortium called the Virtual Cement and Concrete Testing Laboratory, with a Web site at ciks.cbt.nist.gov/vcctl. Companies join the consortium to get access to NIST’s expertise.

“The computer codes are at the point now where it is considered realistic” to move concrete testing into the virtual world, Devaney said. Simulating new types of concrete, instead of mixing up physical samples, not only saves money but also could lead to new forms of concrete with greater crack resistance or special colors.



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