How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

As scientific supercomputing moves toward petascale and exascale levels, in situ visualization stands out as a scalable way for scientists to view the data their simulations generate. This full picture is crucial particularly for capturing and understanding highly intermittent transient phenomena, such as ignition and extinction events in turbulent combustion.

In Situ Visualization for Large-Scale Combustion Simulations

Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries

The ever-increasing amounts of simulation data produced by scientists demand high-end parallel visualization capability. However, image compositing, which requires interprocessor communication, is often the bottleneck stage for parallel rendering of large volume data sets. Existing image compositing solutions either incur a large number of messages exchanged among processors (such as the direct send method), or limit the number of processors that can be effectively utilized (such as the binary swap method). We introduce a new image compositing algorithm, called 2-3 swap, which combines the flexibility of the direct send method and the optimality of the binary swap method. The 2-3 swap algorithm allows an arbitrary number of processors to be used for compositing, and fully utilizes all participating processors throughout the course of the compositing. We experiment with this image compositing solution on a supercomputer with thousands of processors, and demonstrate its great flexibility as well as scalability.

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Massively parallel volume rendering using 2-3 swap image compositing

Sort-last parallel rendering is an efficient technique to visualize huge datasets on COTS clusters. The dataset is subdivided and distributed across the cluster nodes. For every frame, each node renders a full resolution image of its data using its local GPU, and the images are composited together using a parallel image compositing algorithm. In this paper, we present a performance evaluation of standard sort-last parallel rendering methods and of the different improvements proposed in the literature. This evaluation is based on a detailed analysis of the different hardware and software components. We present a new implementation of sort-last rendering that fully overlaps CPU(s), GPU and network usage all along the algorithm. We present experiments on a 3 years old 32-node PC cluster and on a 1.5 years old 5-node PC cluster, both with Gigabit interconnect, showing volume rendering at respectively 13 and 31 frames per second and polygon rendering at respectively 8 and 17 frames per second on a 1024 x 768 render area, and we show that our implementation outperforms or equals many other implementations and specialized visualization clusters.

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COTS cluster-based sort-last rendering: performance evaluation and pipelined implementation

Hardware-accelerated image composition for sort-last parallel rendering has received increasing attention as an effective solution to increased performance demands brought about by the recent advances in commodity graphics accelerators. So far, several different hardware solutions for alpha and depth compositing have been proposed and a few of them have become commercially available. They share impressive compositing speed and high scalability. However, the cost makes it prohibitively expensive to build a large visualization system. In this paper, we used a hardware image compositor marketed by Mitsubishi Precision Co., Ltd. (MPC) which is now available as an independent device enabling the building of our own visualization cluster. This device is based on binary compositing tree architecture, and the scalable cascade interconnection makes it possible to build a large visualization system. However, we focused on a minimal configuration PC cluster using only one compositing device while taking cost into consideration. In order to emulate this cascade interconnection of MPC compositors, we propose and evaluate the hybrid hardware-assisted image composition method which uses the OpenGL alpha blending capability of the graphics boards for assisting the hardware image composition process. Preliminary experiments show that the use of graphics boards diminished the performance degradation when using an emulation based on image feedback through available interconnection network. We found that this proposed method becomes an important alternative for providing high performance image composition at a reasonable cost.

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Hybrid hardware-accelerated image composition for sort-last parallel rendering on graphics clusters with commodity image compositor

In tele-communication via WAN, the existence of co- researchers by transmission of a video in real scene is important in order to realize high-presence, and its display by the large-scale screen is effective. However, the video image by wide-area display using a projector and large screen is low-resolution, and sufficient presence is not obtained. In this paper, we constructed the scalable tiled displays environment by two or more LCD panels and tried to display a high-resolution video image on the large-scale display. Moreover, we located an small IEEE1394 camera at the center of tiled displays, and discussed the possibility of remote communication which eye-to-eye contact can realize with each other. From these results, we have showed that the existence of participant and ambiance in remote place realized to display in high-presence on local tiled displays environment, and high-resolution display of hand-written characters on tiled displays have become clearer when compared to DV stream on plasma display. Moreover, we have examined that user's gaze was tendency to face front for tiled displays in the case of center position.

Tele-Immersive Collaboration Using High-Resolution Video in Tiled Displays Environment

In this paper, we introduce E-Grid, a visual analytics system to aid in the understanding of human cognitive structures. E-Grid supports an evaluation structure that is a type of cognitive structure extracted using the evaluation grid method (EGM), which is a qualitative research method based on semi-structured interviews. The EGM is used to clarify user requirements in several fields of applications, such as environmental psychology, marketing research, and decision support. The importance of understanding user requirements is increasing in modern society because of the diversity of individual’s senses of values. E-Grid is designed to satisfy the requirements of EGM experts. In E-Grid, graph drawing and network analysis techniques are employed and users can explore an evaluation structure with the support of visual analytics techniques. The performance of E-Grid was evaluated in a case study using real data and feedback from EGM experts. Through this evaluation, it is demonstrated that the features of E-Grid make it an efficient and effective tool for the analysis of evaluation structures.

E-Grid: a visual analytics system for evaluation structures

In remote communication over the Internet, we consider that non-verbal communications such as eye-to-eye contact in the real world in addition to the existence of co- researchers by transmission of a video in real scene is important. However, it is difficult to realize communication by eye-to-eye contact because camera which used to shoot participant in remote communication is located at the side or top of display equipment. In this paper, we have constructed the scalable tiled displays environment in two points via LAN. In these environment, we have conducted experimental verification on the effect for eye-to-eye contact by changing the position of camera on frame of LCDs on tiled displays. In these experiments, we have found to have a high tendency to discriminate gazer's direction of eyes in the case that camera is located at close position for direction that an estimator faces on the front. In addition, the accuracy rate in case that camera is bottom position became lower than case of top position. From above results, we have showed experimentally that each participant enables to turn direction of eyes to a camera in a natural way become important factor for realization of eye-to-eye contact in remote communication.

Evaluation Experiment on Eye-to-Eye Contact in Remote Communication with Tiled Displays Environments

Scientific collaborative visualization based on visual data mining is an efficient approach for facilitating the intellectual discovery and understanditgi the visualization data obtained from large-scale ata sets. We think that Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is one of the efficient method to achieve collaborative works by sharing a virtual reality 3D space among users at remote places, In addition, it would be more useful if we could use virtual 3D annotations during collaborative work. In this paper, therefore, we construct a HybridP2P-based CVE in which as wireless handheld PDA is used for making 3D annotations and changing some visualization parameters when necessary.

Nobuyuki Kukimoto

Papers

Hybrid hardware-accelerated image composition for sort-last parallel rendering on graphics clusters with commodity image compositor

Tele-Immersive Collaboration Using High-Resolution Video in Tiled Displays Environment

E-Grid: a visual analytics system for evaluation structures

Evaluation Experiment on Eye-to-Eye Contact in Remote Communication with Tiled Displays Environments

Scientific Visualization in Collaborative Virtual Environment with PDA-Based Control and 3D Annotation