Congratulations to Sudhanshu Sane and Roba Binyahib for each receiving awards at the EuroGraphics Parallel Graphics and Visualization Symposium (EGPGV) today. Sudhanshu's work received Best Paper, while Roba's work received Best Short Paper. Additionally, Sam Schwartz presented his work, for a total of three CDUX papers at EGPGV:

• Scalable In Situ Computation of Lagrangian Representations via Local Flow Maps by Sudhanshu Sane introduced a communication-free approach for calculating Lagrangian flow, and demonstrated the resulting speedups often outweighed any loss in accuracy. Co-authors on the work include Abhishek Yenpure, Roxana Bujack, Matt Larsen, Ken Moreland, Christoph Garth, Christopher R. Johnson, and Hank Childs.
• HyLiPoD: Parallel Particle Advection Via a Hybrid of Lifeline Scheduling and Parallelization-Over-Data by Roba Binyahib built on her earlier CLUSTER results to define a meta-algorithm that performed optimally. Co-authors on this work include David Pugmire and Hank Childs.
• Machine Learning-Based Autotuning for Parallel Particle Advection by Sam Schwartz introduced an approach for using machine learning to optimize the performance of a distributed-memory parallel particle advection algorithm. Co-authors on this work again included David Pugmire and Hank Childs.

Congratulations to CDUX alum Roba Binyahib, who began a staff position at Intel today as a Graphics Engineer working as part of their Advanced Rendering and Visualization team. This position builds on much of her PhD research of scientific visualization and high-performance computing, focusing on developing visualization for large scale.

CDUX personnel and alumni made five presentations at the Department of Energy Computer Graphics Forum (DOECGF), which was held virtually this week:

• Sam Schwartz presented "Machine Learning-Based Autotuning for Parallel Particle Advection," summarizing his results which will appear at EGPGV21 in June.
• Nicole Marsaglia presented "Help Me Graduate! -- A User Study on Camera Position Preference."
• James Kress presented some highlights from his Ph.D. dissertation in "Comparing Time-to-Solution for In Situ Visualization Paradigms at Scale."
• Samuel Li presented on some new work he has done since he graduated with "SPERR -- SPECK Encoding with Error Bounding."
• Matt Larsen presented on Ascent and Devil Ray as part of the CGF's "tools updates."

Finally, CDUX alum Samuel Li served as the Program Chair for the event.

Hank Childs led a tutorial today at the 2021 Exascale Computing Project Annual Meeting (ECPAM). This tutorial was based on successful tutorials offered at ECPAM19 and ECPAM20, although delivered virtually and shortened to 90 minutes. Once again, most of the time was spent presenting on Ascent, with materials from CDUX alum Matt Larsen and LLNL's Cyrus Harrison. Terry Turton and David Rogers of LANL delivered 25 minutes on Cinema, and Ken Moreland of SNL and Berk Geveci of Kitware gave short presentations on VTK-m and Catalyst, respectively.

Congratulations to Dr. Ryan Bleile who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation today!! His committee consisted of Hank Childs (advisor), Allen Malony, Boyana Norris, and Shabnam Akhtari (UO, Mathematics). His thesis, titled "Enhancing Monte Carlo Particle Transport for Modern Many-Core Architectures," considered various ways MC techniques will be challenged by exascale computing, as well as solutions for those challenges. His thesis included four of his five first-authored publications. Ryan joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a staff scientist midway through his Ph.D. process (in April 2018), and completed his dissertation on "nights and weekends." He will continue at LLNL after graduation.

Cyrus Harrison, Matt Larsen, and Hank Childs delivered a virtual tutorial on Ascent today. The tutorial was organized by the Exascale Computing Project, as one of the events they offer throughout the year for online learning. The tutorial is available on YouTube and its slides are available as well.

CDUX M.S. student Yuya Kawakami presented his paper "Benchmarking In Situ Triggers Via Reconstruction Error" today at ISAV 2020. The workshop was scheduled to be held in Atlanta, GA as part of SC20, but was instead held virtually due to COVID-19. The paper considers the recent trend of using lightweight in situ "triggers" to decide whether heavyweight visualization and analysis tasks should occur, and proposes a benchmarking system for evaluating these approaches. CDUX members Nicole Marsaglia and Hank Childs were co-authors on the paper, as well as CDUX alum Matt Larsen.

Hank Childs led a full-day tutorial at SC20 today, titled "In Situ Analysis and Visualization with SENSEI and Ascent." This tutorial repeated the successful tutorial by the same name and team from SC19. Once again, the tutorial provided attendees with VirtualBox images and Jupyter notebook environments so that they could run real-world examples with both SENSEI and Ascent. It also provided an overview of the Cinema. The tutorial had eight total presenters, drawn from their respective software teams.

CDUX Ph.D. student James Kress presented his short paper "Comparing Time-to-Solution for In Situ Visualization Paradigms at Scale" at the IEEE Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization today. As with several of his recent papers, there were eight additional co-authors on the paper, including Hank Childs, CDUX alum Matt Larsen, and frequent CDUX collaborators David Pugmire and Scott Klasky of Oak Ridge. This work was the third (and last) of James' explorations from his thesis comparing in transit and inline visualization. Where the previous two works had focused on cost savings, this final work looked at time-to-solution.

The paper A Terminology for In Situ Visualization and Analysis Systems is now available online and will appear in the November 2020 edition of the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. This paper was a community effort to establish a terminology for in situ systems. Quoting the article:

"In situ processing, meaning visualizing or analyzing data as it is generated, is an alternative processing paradigm to post hoc. Historically, a number of terms have been used to describe in situ processing and its many variant strategies. However, the community has yet to agree on a consistent taxonomy. Notably, over the last decade, the term 'in situ' has been broadly used to 1) describe a specific strategy for processing data, and 2) as an umbrella term for the entire processing paradigm. This mixed use leads to confusion both for the visualization and analysis community and for its stakeholders."

The work also provides a taxonomy of in situ systems, and proposes terminology based on using the taxonomy. The paper had 57 co-authors, who met semi-regularly for several years (at conferences and via phone calls) to refine their ideas.

We are excited to welcome Yuya Kawakami, who joins CDUX as an M.S. student today. Yuya completed his B.S. in computer science at Grinnell College in Iowa in May 2020. Yuya has significant HPC expertise, including multiple internships at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and working with Hank this past summer researching in situ triggers.

Hank Childs has been promoted to the rank of Full Professor. This promotion is based on his performance since being promoted to Associate Professor in September 2015. During this time, Hank averaged publishing ten papers per year (85% of which were first-authored by a CDUX student), advised fourteen completed theses (seven Ph.D., four M.S., and three B.S.), served as Director of Graduate Studies, and organized Dagstuhl and Shonan workshops, among other activities.

CDUX Ph.D. student Roba Binyahib presented her recent research results at the IEEE Cluster Conference today. Her paper, titled "Parallel Particle Advection Bake-Off for Scientific Visualization Workloads," compared four parallelization approaches in a variety of configurations, including concurrencies of up to 8192 cores, data sets as large as 34 billion cells, and as many as 300 million particles. Co-authors for the work were CDUX Ph.D. student Abhishek Yenpure, David Pugmire of Oak Ridge, and Hank Childs.

CDUX Ph.D. student James Kress presented his paper today, "Opportunities for Cost Savings with In Transit Visualization," at the ISC High Performance conference. There were eight additional co-authors on the paper, including Hank Childs, CDUX alum Matt Larsen, and frequent CDUX collaborators David Pugmire and Scott Klasky of Oak Ridge. This work built on James' ISC paper in 2019, which demonstrated that in transit visualization can outperform inline visualization. In this paper, James established a cost model for evaluating when one paradigm will outperform the other and demonstrated a larger set of use cases where in transit will run faster.

Congratulations to Abhishek Yenpure, who has received the J. Donald Hubbard Family Scholarship. This scholarship is awarded to students who show an interest in human-computer interaction, computer graphics, or multimedia. Congratulations Abhishek!!

Congratulations to Kristi Belcher who successfully defended her M.S. thesis today! Her thesis, titled "Efficient Parallel Particle Advection via Targeting Devices," considered how to optimize performance by adaptively choosing between the CPU and GPU. Kristi will begin a position at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in June. She will be working on developing Umpire, a resource management library that allows the discovery, provision, and management of memory on machines with multiple memory devices like NUMA and GPUs.

CDUX Ph.D. student Sudhanshu Sane presented his State of the Art Report (STAR) at the EuroVis Conference. His survey paper, titled A Survey of Seed Placement and Streamline Selection Techniques, will be published in the Computer Graphics Forum journal. Co-authors on the work include Roxana Bujack, Christoph Garth, and Hank Childs. The survey was derived from the paper generated for his Area Exam at the University of Oregon.

Congratulations to Dr. Sudhanshu Sane who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation today!! His committee consisted of Hank Childs (advisor), Boyana Norris, Brittany Erickson, and Leif Karlstrom (UO, Earth Sciences). His thesis, titled "Establishing the Viability and Efficacy of In Situ Reduction Via Lagrangian Representations for Time-Dependent Vector Fields," incorporated all three of his first-authored publications, and also included three additional works which are under submission or will be submitted soon. After graduation, Sudhanshu will begin working as a post-doctoral researcher for Chris Johnson at the University of Utah.

CDUX personnel and alumni made five presentations at the Department of Energy Computer Graphics Forum (DOECGF), which was held virtually this week:

• Matt Larsen made two presentations: "Interactive In Situ Visualization and Analysis Using Ascent and Jupyter" and "Devil Ray: A Portably Performant Ray Tracer for High-Order Element Visualization."
• Alister Maguire presented "Deep Learning Mesh Relaxation for Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian Simulations."
• James Kress presented "In-line vs. In-transit In Situ: Which Technique to Use at Scale?"
• Hank Childs presented an overview of activities at the University of Oregon.

Sudhanshu Sane began delivering his data visualization course today for computer science undergraduates at the University of Oregon. He is being supported by the Moursund Graduate Scholarship. Sudhanshu has designed the course from scratch, and is the instructor of record for this course.

Congratulations to Dr. Roba Binyahib who successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation today!! Her committee consisted of Hank Childs (advisor), Allen Malony, Boyana Norris, and Amanda Thomas (UO, Earth Sciences). Her thesis, titled "Evaluating Parallel Particle Advection Algorithms over Various Workloads" incorporated three of her four existing first-authored publications, plus an additional work that is in progress. Roba will begin as a post-doctoral researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) after graduation, working with Kenny Gruchalla. This position is a return for Roba, who did a summer internship at NREL in 2018.

Congratulations to Dr. James Kress who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation today!! His committee consisted of Hank Childs (advisor), Allen Malony, Boyana Norris, Victor Ostrik (UO, Math), and David Pugmire (Oak Ridge). His thesis, titled "In-line vs. In-transit In Situ: Which Technique to Use at Scale?" incorporated four of his eight first-authored publications, and also included an additional work that is in progress. James previously started as a staff position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and will continue in that role after graduation.

Hank Childs has begun a term as an Associate Editor for the journal IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. His duties will include evaluating submissions by assigning them to reviewers, making a recommendation for publication or rejection based upon the referee reports, and helping solicit submissions to the journal.

Hank Childs led a tutorial today at the 2020 Exascale Computing Project Annual Meeting (ECPAM). This tutorial was based on the successful tutorial offered at ECPAM19. Once again, two thirds of the time was spent presenting on Ascent, with materials from CDUX alum Matt Larsen, Hank, and LLNL's Cyrus Harrison. The remainder of the time was spent describing algorithms being developed by in situ processing (Hank), VTK-m (Sandia's Ken Moreland), and Cinema (LANL's Terry Turton).

CDUX Ph.D. alumnus Brent Lessley presented his paper today HashFight: A Platform-Portable Hash Table for Multi-Core and Many-Core Architectures at the Visualization and Data Analysis (VDA) conference in Burlingame, CA today. Brent performed the research behind this work while he was a student in CDUX, and included the results in his dissertation. He then submitted the paper shortly after his defense. CDUX alumnus Samuel Li and Hank Childs were also co-authors. The work formalized the hashing technique Brent developed as part of an external facelist algorithm based on data-parallel primitives. In his VDA work, Brent compared his hardware-agnostic approach with hardware-specific comparators and showed his approach performed favorably or competitively for many workloads.

CDUX Ph.D. student Roba Binyahib's paper In Situ Particle Advection Via Parallelizing Over Particles appeared today at ISAV 2019 in Denver, CO. The paper challenges the widely held assumption that in situ processing should employ a parallelization approach over data blocks, by showing use cases where execution time savings with other approaches are so significant that they may offset concerns about memory usage. The co-authors of the paper were David Pugmire of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Hank Childs. Hank presented the paper, since Roba was getting her visa renewed and unable to attend.

Hank Childs led a full-day tutorial at SC19 today, titled "In Situ Analysis and Visualization with SENSEI and Ascent." The tutorial provided attendees with VirtualBox images and Jupyter notebook environments so that they could run real-world examples with both SENSEI and Ascent. It also provided an overview of the Cinema and VTK-m projects, as well as covering recent results for in situ algorithms. The tutorial had eight total presenters, drawn from their respective software teams.

Congratulations to CDUX Ph.D. student Roba Binyahib for winning a Best Paper Honorable Mention today for her paper A Lifeline-Based Approach for Work Requesting and Parallel Particle Advection. The paper appeared at the IEEE Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV) Symposium in Vancouver, Canada. Co-authors included David Pugmire, Boyana Norris, and Hank Childs. The work bridges results from the HPC community into the visualization community, specifically in a new work requesting method for particle advection that uses the recent Lifeline approach for identifying victims.

CDUX played a major role in delivering a half-day tutorial today on VTK-m at the IEEE Visualization conference in Vancouver. Hank Childs organized the tutorial, along with Ken Moreland of Sandia, David Pugmire of Oak Ridge, and Robert Maynard of Kitware. Further, CDUX Ph.D. students Abhishek Yenpure and Samuel Schwartz served as tutorial assistants, including preparing materials (slides, code examples, wiki pages, and virtual machine). The tutorial was well attended, with approximately 50 attendees throughout.

The Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project has renewed two multi-institution awards that fund the CDUX group:

• ALPINE: Algorithms and Infrastructure for In Situ Visualization and Analysis. The overall award is led by James Ahrens of Los Alamos Lab, with Hank Childs as Deputy PI. This effort includes partners at Lawrence Livermore Lab, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Oak Ridge Lab, Sandia Lab, Argonne Lab, the University of Utah, and Kitware, Inc.
• VTK-m: Updating HPC Visualization Software for Exascale-Era Processors. The overall award is led by Ken Moreland of Sandia Labs, and includes partners at Los Alamos Lab, Oak Ridge Lab, and Kitware, Inc.

Funding for these awards runs through 2023.

Hank Childs and CDUX alum Matt Larsen both presented today at the CEED Annual Meeting at the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, VA. CEED is an exascale co-design center focusing on delivering higher-order element technology to simulation codes, specifically those that are part of the Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project. Hank presented an overview of the ECP visualization strategy, including the VTK-m and Ascent projects, and Matt presented an overview of his DevilRay renderer for higher order elements.

CDUX team members Abhishek Yenpure and Hank Childs participated in the hackathon for the VTK-m project. The hackathon was a 2.5 day event, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Hank gave a tutorial to attendees on VTK-m, and also worked on extending VTK-m with mesh quality metrics. Abhishek focused on honing VTK-m's particle advection code, along with frequent CDUX collaborator Dave Pugmire.

CDUX Ph.D. student Ryan Bleile presented his paper today Thin-Threads: An Approach for History-Based Monte Carlo on GPUs at the HPCS conference in Dublin, Ireland. There were six additional co-authors on the paper, including Hank Childs and Ryan's LLNL mentor Patrick Brantley. This work collected best practices for Monte Carlo transport on GPUs, terming the collected approach as "thin threads" and contrasting the approach with predecessor, "fat thread" approaches.

Congratulations to Sudhanshu Sane, who has received the inaugural Moursund Graduate Scholarship. This scholarship supports future educators. In addition to financial support from the scholarship, Sudhanshu will receive support from the CIS Department to teach a course of his own design. His scholarship application proposed a course focusing on data visualization, which Sudhanshu will deliver in Spring 2020. Congratulations Sudhanshu!!

CDUX Ph.D. student James Kress presented his paper today Comparing the Efficiency of In Situ Visualization Paradigms at Scale at the ISC High Performance conference in Frankfurt, Germany. There were eight additional co-authors on the paper, including Hank Childs, CDUX alum Matt Larsen, and frequent CDUX collaborators David Pugmire and Scott Klasky of Oak Ridge. This work challenges the traditional view that the highest performance for in situ visualization is to run the visualization on the same resources as the simulation. Instead, James considered scenarios where simulation data was sent to separate resources and visualized there. In his results, James found that the costs for data transfer times and separate resources can be offset by better scalability when running visualization at smaller scale.

Hank Childs has received the CIS Department's Best Teacher Award for 2019. The award was chosen based on student nominations from this year's graduating class, and was presented at today's commencement ceremony. This is the fourth time in five years that Hank has received the Best Teacher Award.

Laura Queen received an award from UO's Clark Honors College (CHC), indicating that she produced one of CHC's very top theses this year. The specific award she received was the Robert D. Clark Award, which commemorates CHC’s founder. The criteria for this award is a commitment to the liberal arts, as well as an impressive thesis. Congratulations Laura!!

Three CDUX papers were presented at the EuroGraphics Parallel Graphics and Visualization Symposium (EGPGV) today.

• Efficient Point Merge Using Data Parallel Techniques by Abhishek Yenpure, which was focused on using data-parallel primitives to solve this common underlying visualization operation in a performance portable manner. Co-authors on this work included Hank Childs and Ken Moreland.
• An Interpolation Scheme for VDVP Lagrangian Basis Flows by Sudhanshu Sane, which removed constraints previously imposed on in situ reduction via Lagrangian techniques to achieve better tradeoffs in storage and accuracy. Co-authors on this work included Hank Childs and Roxana Bujack.
• Dynamic I/O Budget Reallocation For In Situ Wavelet Compression by Nicole Marsaglia, which proposed a new method for adapting the amount of data stored by each node of a supercomputer to where it will help the most. Co-authors on this work included Shaomeng Li, Kristi Belcher, Matt Larsen, and Hank Childs.

EGPGV was located in Porto, Portugal.

As the school year winds down, four of our students will leave Eugene for new settings this summer:

• Nicole Marsaglia will return to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to work with Burlen Loring and Gunther Weber on in situ processing with SENSEI.
• Abhishek Yenpure will return to Sandia National Laboratories to work with Kenneth Moreland on the VTK-m library.
• Kristi Belcher will head to Oak Ridge National Laboratory work with David Pugmire on optimizing performance on leading-edge supercomputers.
• Steven Walton will head to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to work with CDUX alum Matt Larsen on in situ visualization within Ascent.

The other Ph.D. students in our group will all be working hard as well:

• Ryan Bleile and James Kress have staff positions at Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge, respectively, and are working on results for their dissertations.
• Roba Binyahib and Sudhanshu Sane both opted to stay at UO this summer to make dedicated pushes on their dissertation work.

Congratulations to Laura Queen, who has successfully completed her BS thesis, titled "Estimating Future Flood Risk in the Columbia River Basin Under Climate Change Using an Ensemble of Hydrologic Simulations." Her thesis was connected with her role in the Clark Honors College, and she received the highest evaluation for her work: with distinction. Her committee consisted of Hank Childs, Phil Mote (OSU), and Barbara Mossberg.

CDUX Ph.D. alumna Stephanie Labasan presented her paper Power and Performance Tradeoffs for Visualization Algorithms at the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium. Co-authors included Matt Larsen, Hank Childs, and Barry Rountree. This work assessed tradeoffs between power usage and execution time for eight visualization algorithms, with findings that many had opportunities with respect to hardware overprovisioning. This work was a crucial part of Stephanie's dissertation. IPDPS was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Congratulations to Brent Lessley, who accepted a position at Verb Surgical today. Verb is a joint venture between Google and Johnson & Johnson, and is located on the Google campus in Mountain View, CA. They are building a digital surgery platform that combines robotics, visualization, instrumentation, data analytics, and connectivity. Brent will be applying his expertise in designing efficient many-core algorithms.

Congratulations to Stephanie Labasan, who started in a full-time staff position in CASC at Lawrence Livermore today. Stephanie will continue working with the same team she worked with as a Ph.D. student, and will be continuing work from her dissertation on power-constrained high-performance computing.

We are excited to welcome Sam Schwartz, who will join CDUX as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2019. Samuel will complete an M.S. in Mathematics at Utah State University later this term. Sam has had varied experiences in his path to joining a computer science Ph.D. program, including teaching English for a Chilean high school.

Congratulations to Dr. Stephanie Labasan (Brink) who successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation today!! Her committee consisted of Hank Childs (advisor), Allen Malony, Boyana Norris, Nicholas Proudfoot (UO, Mathematics), and Barry Rountree (Lawrence Livermore). Stephanie's dissertation incorporated her existing three first-authored publications, plus an additional work that is in progress.

Congratulations to Dr. Brent Lessley who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation today!! His committee consisted of Hank Childs (advisor), Boyana Norris, Chris Wilson, and Eric Torrence (UO, Physics). Brent's dissertation incorporated his existing four first-authored publications, plus two works in progress. One of the works builds on his HashFight hashing scheme, while the other is a survey paper deriving from his Area Exam.

Hank Childs was a co-organizer of a week-long Shonan Meeting on visualization software in Kanagawa, Japan. The seminar's other co-organizers were Takayuki Itoh, Michael Krone, and Guido Reina. The seminar's focus was on understanding the research challenges behind visualization software systems, as well as fostering closer connections between disparate development groups.

The Dagstuhl report was released today for the July 2018 seminar titled In Situ Visualization for Computational Science. Hank Childs was a co-organizer of the seminar, along with Janine Bennett, Christoph Garth, and Bernd Hentschel. The seminar was made up of participants with expertise in visualization, high-performance computing, and computational science.

Hank Childs led a tutorial at the Exascale Computing Project's Annual Meeting today. Two thirds of the time was spent presenting on Ascent, with materials from CDUX alum Matt Larsen, Hank, and LLNL's Cyrus Harrison. The remainder of the time was spent describing algorithms being developed by in situ processing (Hank), VTK-m (Sandia's Ken Moreland), and Cinema (LANL's David Rogers).

CDUX Ph.D. alumnus Matt Larsen received the Best Paper awards at the Workshop on In Situ Infrastructures for Enabling Extreme-Scale Analysis and Visualization (ISAV), which was co-located with SC18. Other CDUX participants on the paper include Ph.D. student Nicole Marsaglia and Hank Childs, and the full list of authors included Amy Woods, Ayan Biswas, Soumya Dutta, and Cyrus Harrison. The paper, titled A Flexible System for In Situ Triggers considers the topic of adapting visualization and analysis based on simulation state. Congratulations Matt!

CDUX Ph.D. student Roba Binyahib presented her paper "A Scalable Hybrid Scheme for Ray-Casting of Unstructured Volume Data" today at the IEEE VIS conference in Berlin, Germany. The paper has been accepted at the journal IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), and was presented at the VIS conference through an arrangement between VIS and TVCG. Co-authors on the work include Tom Peterka, Matt Larsen, Kwan-Liu Ma, and Hank Childs. The work showed the scalability of a novel approach for unstructured volume rendering in parallel. The approach has a particular emphasis on difficult-to-parallelize use cases, for example highly varying cell sizes or camera positions that are zoomed in on a small region of a data set.

CDUX Ph.D. student Brent Lessley presented his paper DPP-PMRF: Rethinking Optimization for a Probabilistic Graphical Model Using Data-Parallel Primitives today. The paper appeared in the IEEE Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV) Symposium in Berlin, Germany. Co-authors included Talita Perciano, Colleen Heinemann, David Camp, Hank Childs, and Wes Bethel. The work considered probabilistic graphical model optimization, an important technique for computer vision, in the context of data-parallel primitives.

Kristi Belcher is participating in the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC). This program aims to "provide intensive, two-week training on the key skills, approaches, and tools to design, implement, and execute computational science and engineering applications on current high-end computing systems and the leadership-class computing systems of the future." Participation is competitive and is based on an application process. The ATPESC program is paying all expenses for Kristi to spend two weeks in Illinois.

Hank Childs was a co-organizer of a week-long seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl on In Situ Visualization for Computational Science in Wadern, Germany. The seminar's other co-organizers were Janine Bennett, Christoph Garth, and Bernd Hentschel. The seminar's focus was on bringing together three communities: visualization experts, HPC experts, and computational scientists.

CDUX was involved in multiple activities at the ISC High Performance Workshop on In Situ Visualization in Frankfurt, Germany today:

• Nicole Marsaglia's work, titled Enabling Explorative Visualization With Full Temporal Resolution Via In Situ Calculation Of Temporal Intervals was presented. The work explored using time intervals to capture a complete spatiotemporal representation of the data set.
• James Kress's work, titled Binning Based Data Reduction for Vector Field Data of a Particle-In-Cell Fusion Simulation was presented. The work explored tradeoffs when using binning-based compression.
• CDUX alum Matt Larsen was also one of the event's keynote speakers.

Hank Childs received a Faculty Excellence Award from the University of Oregon. The fund is designed to recognize, reward and retain nationally competitive faculty members who have a record of excellence in research, scholarship, creative accomplishment and education. Hank was one of 15 faculty members to receive the award campus-wide. The awards provide faculty members with a $20,000 salary supplement or $30,000 for research support. The UO press release on the awards can be found here.

Congratulations to both Manish Mathai and Garrett Morrison for three-fold accomplishments: completing their theses, completing their M.S. degrees, and lining up employment.

• Manish's thesis was titled "A Tile-Based Approach For Photo-Realistic Volume Rendering." His next position will be at Microsoft Corporation in Bellevue, WA. He will be working on Teams, a communication platform for small to large groups of people.
• Garrett's thesis was titled "On the Performance of Line Integral Convolution in a Distributed-Memory Parallel Setting." His next position will be as an intern at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA. He will be working with Harsh Bhatia on VisIt rendering issues.

Our group's students will be busy this summer!
Four of our students will leave Eugene for new settings this summer:

• Roba Binyahib will head to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to work with Kenny Gruchalla on in situ processing for wind simulations.
• Nicole Marsaglia will head to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to work with Burlen Loring and Gunther Weber on in situ processing of AMR meshes.
• Sudhanshu Sane is working with Christoph Garth at Kaiserslautern Technical University in Germany on Lagrangian flow.
• Abhishek Yenpure will head to Sandia National Laboratories to work with Kenneth Moreland on the VTK-m library.

Three students have already been doing their research remotely, and will continue doing so:

• Stephanie Labasan has been conducting her research from LLNL as part of her Livermore Graduate Research Fellowship. She hopes to complete her dissertation this summer.
• Ryan Bleile and James Kress have staff positions at Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge, respectively, and are working on results for their dissertations.

Additionally:

• Kristi Belcher is taking advantage of the CIS Department's funding for her Directed Research Project.
• Brent Lessley opted to stay at UO this summer to complete his dissertation and interview for jobs.
• Incoming Ph.D. student Steven Walton went to Oak Ridge National Laboratory to work with David Pugmire.

Two CDUX students received scholarships from the CIS Department:

• Kristi Belcher received the Phillip W. and Judy A. Seeley Graduate Fellowship in Computer and Information Science. The scholarship is for unrestricted support for graduate students for awards, tuition, research, materials, supplies, travel, or wages. Kristi will use the scholarship to travel to the Grace Hopper Celebration.
• Roba Binyahib received the J. Donald Hubbard Family Scholarship in Computer and Information Science. Established in 2003 by the Hubbard family, this scholarship is awarded to a graduate student in Computer and Information Science who shows an interest in computer graphics. Roba was selected after her first-authored paper in the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics journal. Roba will use the scholarship to travel to the IEEE Visualization conference in Berlin, Germany in October 2018.

Congratulations Kristi and Roba!!

CDUX Ph.D. alumni Shaomeng Li presented his State of the Art Report (STAR) at the EuroVis Conference. His survey paper, titled Data Reduction Techniques for Simulation, Visualization, and Data Analysis, was initially published in the Computer Graphics Forum journal. Co-authors on the work include CDUX Ph.D. student Nicole Marsaglia, Christoph Garth, Jonathan Woodring, John Clyne, and Hank Childs. The survey was derived from the paper generated for his Area Exam at the University of Oregon.

Sudhanshu Sane presented his research results at the EuroGraphics Parallel Graphics and Visualization Symposium (EGPGV). The paper he presented was titled Revisiting the Evaluation of In Situ Lagrangian Analysis, and was focused on establishing new evaluation and baselines that was missing in previous work. Co-authors on his paper included Roxana Bujack and Hank Childs.

We are excited to welcome Ph.D. student Valentin Bruder from the VIS group at Stuttgart University. Valentin will visit us for three months, and we will collaborate on performance modeling for scientific visualization.

Roba Binyahib presented her recent research results at the Department of Energy Computer Graphics Forum (DOECGF) in Savannah, GA. She presented her work on parallel ray-casted volume rendering for unstructured meshes, which was recently accepted to the journal IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG).

Congratulations to Ryan Bleile, who begins his new staff position as a Computer Scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory today! His job assignment will continue his Ph.D. work on Monte Carlo radiation transport. Ryan had already been working as a remote student at LLNL, via his Lawrence Scholar Graduate Fellowship. He will complete his dissertation from LLNL.

We are excited to welcome Steven Walton, who has agreed to join CDUX as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2018. Steven previously completed his B.S. at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU), receiving a degree in Space Physics. He then worked at Glover-Taylor Labs LLC, where he led and performed research in a NASA Phase I STTR project that led to Phase II funding.

Hank Childs presented a talk for OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) as part of their Science Pub series. With this series, a scientific expert presents a topic on to a general audience. Hank's talk was titled " Your Computer: Just How Powerful Is it, and Is That Enough?."

Abhishek Yenpure has converted from an M.S. student to a Ph.D. student. Abhishek was a CDUX member as an M.S. student, and will continue with CDUX as a Ph.D. student. He will be exploring flow visualization on exascale machines for his dissertation research. Welcome (again) Abhishek!

Congratulations to Jeremy Brennan, who begins his new staff position at Intel today! His official title is Driver Developer for the Integrated GFX Card, and he will work on Intel's integrated graphics card optimizing the driver code for games. Jeremy previously was an intern for the same group in the summer of 2017. His UO experience, both as a student in the CIS441 graphics class and as an undergraduate research optimizing VisIt for the Xeon Phi, helped prepare him for the job. Jeremy completed his B.S. in December 2017.

Congratulations to Dr. Shaomeng (Samuel) Li, who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation today!! His committee consisted of Hank Childs (advisor), Allen Malony, Boyana Norris, and Emilie Hooft Toomey (UO, Earth Sciences). Sam's dissertation incorporated four of his five first-authored publications from his time at UO. Sam already began a staff position at NCAR in September of 2016, and will continue in that position after graduation.

CDUX Ph.D. student Shaomeng (Samuel) Li and CDUX alum Matt Larsen presented recent research results at the ISAV workshop, held in conjunction with SC17, in Denver, CO.

• Samuel's paper, titled Performance Impacts of In Situ Wavelet Compression on Scientific Simulations, looked at the conditions where wavelet compression can accelerate I/O performance. Co-authors on the work include Matt Larsen, John Clyne, and Hank Childs.
• Matt's paper, titled The ALPINE In Situ Infrastructure: Ascending from the Ashes of Strawman, described the ASCENT framework, which is the successor to the Strawman in situ mini-app. Co-authors on the work include James Ahrens, Utkarsh Ayachit, Eric Brugger, Hank Childs, Berk Geveci, and Cyrus Harrison.

CDUX Ph.D. student Brent Lessley presented two recent research results at the IEEE Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV) Symposium today in Phoenix, AZ. His first paper, titled Maximal Clique Enumeration with Data-Parallel Primitives, demonstrated a new algorithm for maximal clique enumeration with an emphasis on portable performance across architectures. This paper also provides some initial encouraging evidence that data-parallel primitives are a viable technique for graph algorithms, whereas most recent research has focused on scientific visualization algorithms. Co-authors on the work include Talita Perciano and Wes Bethel of Lawrence Berkeley, as well as Manish Mathai and Hank Childs. Brent's second paper, titled Techniques for Data-Parallel Searching for Duplicate Elements, built on Brent's EGPGV paper in 2016 which looked at the external facelist calculation problem. As that work was extended to more architectures and more hashing techniques, limits to performance portability were uncovered. His LDAV paper explained these limits and demonstrated best practices. Co-authors on this work included Ken Moreland of Sandia Labs, CDUX alum Matt Larsen (now of LLNL), and Hank Childs.

Two CDUX students presented at the Doctoral Colloquium (DC) at the IEEE Visualization Conference in Phoenix, AZ. The DC connects experts with Ph.D. students. During the Colloquium, the students present their plans for their dissertations, and the experts provide feedback about how to strengthen their research. Our two participants were:

• Stephanie Labasan, presentation: Optimizing Visualization Performance on Power-Constrained Supercomputers
• James Kress, presentation: Tightly vs. Loosely Coupled In Situ: Which Technique to Use at Scale?

Hank Childs will serve as Program Co-Chair for the 18th EuroGraphics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, which will be co-located with EuroVis in Brno, Czech Republic in June 2018. Ph.D. student Kristi Belcher will serve as the Student Program Chair.

CDUX Ph.D. student Shaomeng Li traveled to Honolulu, Hawaii to present his recent research results at the IEEE Cluster Conference. The acceptance rate for Cluster 2017 was 20%, and only 15% for papers on data, storage, or visualization. His paper, titled Spatiotemporal Wavelet Compression for Visualization of Scientific Simulation Data, explored the value of using deep memory hierarchies on supercomputers, specifically to encode more information per bit by exploiting temporal coherence, instead of just spatial coherence. Co-authors on the work include CDUX Ph.D. student Sudhanshu Sane, Leigh Orf, Pablo Mininni, John Clyne, and Hank Childs.

Samuel Li's dissertation research was presented at the ISC High Performance Workshop on In Situ Visualization in Frankfurt, Germany today. The presentation was titled "Wavelets as an In Situ Compression Operator for Post Hoc Exploration," and made the case that wavelets should be used for exascale computing.

Hank Childs gave an invited presentation at the ISC High Performance Conference in Frankfurt, Germany today. The talk was part of a session on High Performance Visualization, organized by Chris Johnson of the University of Utah. The speakers were Hank, Chris, and Ingo Wald of Intel. Hank's presentation focused on in situ processing, including challenges with fitting within simulation code constraints and with efficient programming, and opportunities resulting from increased data access.

Congratulations to Alister Maguire, who completed his B.S. in computer science today! Next, he will go to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a computer programmer. In this role, he will work on the VisIt project, and also on other LLNL projects. Alister's UO experience, both as a student in the CIS441 graphics class and as an undergraduate research optimizing VisIt for the Xeon Phi, helped prepare him for the job.

Hank Childs has received the CIS Department's Best Teacher Award for 2017. The award was chosen based on student nominations from this year's graduating class, and was presented at today's commencement ceremony. This is the third straight year Hank has received the Best Teacher Award.

Manish Mathai received the J. Donald Hubbard Family Scholarship in Computer and Information Science at the CIS Department's commencement ceremony. This scholarship is awarded to students who show an interest in human-computer interaction, computer graphics, or multimedia. Congratulations Manish!!

Nine CDUX students will be spending their summers at DOE labs.
Six of our students will leave Eugene for new settings this summer:

• Roba Binyahib, Nicole Marsaglia, and Abhishek Yenpure will head to Oak Ridge National Laboratory to work with David Pugmire on topics relating to particle advection and in situ processing.
• Brent Lessley will return to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to work with Wes Bethel on shared-memory parallel visualization techniques.
• Sudhanshu Sane will head to Los Alamos National Laboratory to work with Roxana Bujack on Lagrangian flow.
• Manish Mathai will head to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to work with CDUX alum Matt Larsen on parallel rendering.

Four students have already been doing their research remotely, and will continue doing so:

• Ryan Bleile won the Livermore Graduate Research Fellowship in May of 2015, and has been conducting his research from LLNL for the last two years.
• Stephanie Labasan also won the Livermore Graduate Research Fellowship in May of 2015. Before starting her fellowship, she spent one year at Intel working with the RAPL group. She is now completing the first full year of her fellowship.
• Shaomeng Li has a staff position at NCAR, and is in the final stages of completing his dissertation.
• James Kress has a staff position at Oak Ridge, and is working on results for his dissertation.

Two CDUX Ph.D. students presented their research results at EuroGraphics Parallel Graphics and Visualization Symposium (EGPGV):

• Stephanie Labasan presented PaViz: A Power-Adaptive Framework for Optimizing Visualization Performance, which explored the benefits of adapting power allocations to where they will do the most good using performance modeling. Co-authors on her paper included CDUX alum Matt Larsen, Barry Rountree of LLNL, and Hank Childs.
• Nicole Marsaglia presented Achieving Portable Performance For Wavelet Compression Using Data Parallel Primitives, which explored a hardware-agnostic wavelet compressor that could perform as well as hardware-specific wavelet compressors. The first author on the paper was CDUX Ph.D. student Shaomeng Li, who was unable to travel to Barcelona. Additional co-authors on the paper included Vincent Chen, Chris Sewell, John Clyne, and Hank Childs.

Hank Childs delivered the keynote presentation at the Software-Defined Visualization Workshop in Austin, TX. The event was hosted by TACC, and was part of a series of workshops known as IXPUG: the Intel Xeon Phi Users Group. Hank's talk was titled "State of the Art for In Situ Visualization."

We are excited to welcome Kristi Belcher, who has agreed to join CDUX as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2017. Kristi previously completed her B.S. at Texas State University, where she worked with Dr. Martin Burtscher as part of the Efficient Computing Laboratory. Her work culminated in a thesis, "Multi-GPU Parallelization of Irregular Algorithms." Further, we congratulate Kristi on winning an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. These fellowships are extremely competitive, and provide Kristi with three years of funding. Great job Kristi, and we are very glad that you will be joining the team!!

The CDUX group hosted a 2.5 day code sprint for the VTK-m project. The event benefited many of our students, as their research often involves using VTK-m. Many prominent members from the project attended, including Ken Moreland of Sandia, Rob Maynard of Kitware, and Dave Pugmire of Oak Ridge, among others. Remote students James Kress and Stephanie Labasan also joined us for the event, along with alum Matt Larsen.

We are very excited to welcome Bernd Hentschel of RWTH Aachen for a one month "mini-sabbatical." Bernd was selected for a Theodore-von-Karman-Fellowship for Outgoing Scientists, which enables researchers to visit collaborators for extended periods. During his time with the CDUX group, we will collaborate with Bernd on several topics, including particle advection, many-core visualization, and virtual reality for very large data.

Congratulations to Kristi Potter who has accepted a scientist position at NREL working with Kenny Gruchalla. Kristi joined CDUX as a Co-Director in September 2013, in addition to her campus-wide role as a visualization evangelist. We will miss her and wish her the best in her new position.

CDUX Ph.D. student Ryan Bleile presented his research today at the SPIE Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis in San Francisco, CA. Ryan's paper was titled Accelerating Advection Via Approximate Block Exterior Flow Maps. The work explored tradeoffs between performance and accuracy for compute-intensive flow visualization algorithms. Co-authors on the work included Christoph Garth of Kaiserslautern University, Linda Sugiyama of MIT, and Hank Childs.

Two M.S. students, Abhishek Yenpure and Garrett Morrison, have joined our team. Abhishek joins us from us from Pune, India, after spending three years in industry. He will be working on parallel particle advection in VTK-m. Garrett had already been with CDUX previously, first as an undergrad researcher and then as a staff member. As an M.S. student, he will be optimizing VisIt for the Xeon Phi for our Intel Parallel Computing Center. Welcome Abhishek and welcome back Garrett!!

Congratulations to James Kress, who begins his new staff position as a Computer Scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory today! His job assignment will continue his Ph.D. work, including in situ processing of very large data sets. He will be working on the ADIOS and VTK-m software tools. James will continue in the Ph.D. program as a remote student, and will complete his dissertation from ORNL.

Congratulations to Dr. Matt Larsen, who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation today!! His committee consisted of Hank Childs (advisor), Allen Malony, Boyana Norris, Paul Navratil (TACC), and Eric Corwin (UO, Physics). Matt's dissertation incorporated four of his five first-authored publications from his time at UO. Matt already began a staff position at LLNL in January of 2016, and will continue in that position after graduation.

CDUX Ph.D. student Matt Larsen presented his recent research results at the SC16 conference in Salt Lake City, UT. His paper, a Best Paper Finalist, was titled Performance Modeling of In Situ Rendering. The work established a performance model over three rendering techniques, two architectures, and many rendering workloads. He then used the performance model to look at feasibility of in situ rendering workloads and to answer questions about relative benefit of rasterization and ray-tracing. Co-authors on the work include Cyrus Harrison of Lawrence Livermore, Dave Pugmire of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Jeremy Meredith (formerly of Oak Ridge), and CDUX members James Kress and Hank Childs.

CDUX Ph.D. student James Kress presented his recent research results at the ISAV workshop, held in conjunction with SC16, in Salt Lake City, UT. His paper, titled Visualization and Analysis Requirements for In Situ Processing for a Large-Scale Fusion Simulation Code, reported on his survey of the XGC1 code team, with an eye toward in situ feasibility questions. Co-authors on the work include Dave Pugmire and Scott Klasky of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Hank Childs.

The Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project has made two multi-institution awards that will fund the CDUX group:

• ALPINE: Algorithms and Infrastructure for In Situ Visualization and Analysis. The overall award is led by James Ahrens of Los Alamos Lab, and includes partners at Lawrence Livermore Lab, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and Kitware, Inc.
• VTK-m: Updating HPC Visualization Software for Exascale-Era Processors. The overall award is led by Ken Moreland of Sandia Labs, and includes partners at Los Alamos Lab, Oak Ridge Lab, and Kitware, Inc.

Funding for these awards runs through 2019. The press release for all of the ECP software awards can be found here.

CDUX Ph.D. student Ryan Bleile traveled to Las Vegas to present his recent research results at the American Nuclear Society's Annual Winter Meeting. His paper, titled Algorithmic Improvements for Portable Event-Based Monte Carlo Transport Using the Nvidia Thrust Library, compared optimized CUDA and Thrust implementations in an effort to understand the costs for taking a hardware-agnostic approach.

CDUX Ph.D. student Matt Larsen presented his recent research results at the IEEE Large Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV) Symposium today in Baltimore, MD. His paper, titled Optimizing Multi-Image Sort-Last Parallel Rendering, demonstrated new algorithms that render batches of images together as much as twenty times faster than the current approach of rendering images one at a time. Co-authors on the work include Ken Moreland of Sandia National Laboratories, Chris Johnson of the University of Utah, and Hank Childs.

Congratulations to Samuel Li, who begins his new staff position as a Computer Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) today! His job assignment will build on his Ph.D. work, including wavelet compression of very large data sets. He will also be working on the VAPOR software tool. Sam will continue in the Ph.D. program as a remote student, and will complete his dissertation from NCAR.

Congratulations to undergrad researcher Garrett Morrison, who graduated and received his Bachelor of Science. Garrett has worked as a CDUX undergrad researcher since Winter 2016. During that time, he worked on the GraviT ray-tracing project and the VisIt visualization program. Garrett will continue with CDUX, working as a staff member. He hopes to start as an MS student at UO in 2017.

Hank Childs gave an invited presentation at the Smoky Mountains Conference (SMC16) in Gatlinburg, TN this week. The presentation focused on in situ processing, including challenges with efficient programming and opportunities resulting from increased data access. Hank also visited Oak Ridge Lab and UT-Knoxville to deliver invited talks and meet with collaborators. At ORNL, Hank met with Dave Pugmire and CDUX Ph.D. student James Kress, who has been doing his dissertation research at ORNL. At UTK, Hank met with Prof. Jian Huang and CDUX alum (and now UTK Ph.D. student) Kirsten Dawes.

Hank Childs delivered one of the keynote presentations at the ISC High Performance Workshop on In Situ Visualization in Frankfurt, Germany. The presentation was titled "In Situ Processing: Instantiations, Opportunities, and Challenges," and focused on work from the In Situ Terminology Project, Lagrangian flows, and performance modeling.

Hank Childs taught a 2-day short course for the Vlaams Supercomputer Centrum, a virtual center of five Flemish universities. The course, titled Visualization with VTK and VisIt, took place in Leuven, Belgium, on the KU Leuven campus.

Matt Larsen's submission to the SC16 conference was selected as a Best Paper Finalist. The title of his paper is "Performance Modeling for In Situ Rendering." His study looked at three rendering techniques (rasterization, ray-tracing, and volume rendering), and multiple architectures (GPU and CPU) and built a performance model over diverse rendering workloads. The results are useful, since visualization algorithms frequently need to fit within in situ constraints, and this model will allow researchers to predict whether they can. Co-authors on the work include James Kress and Hank Childs of CDUX, as well as Cyrus Harrison of LLNL and Jeremy Meredith and David Pugmire of ORNL. Congratulations everyone!!

Undergrad researcher Ouermi Timbwaoga Aime Judicael (TAJO) graduated today, receiving his Bachelor of Science. TAJO has worked as a CDUX undergrad researcher since Fall of 2015. During that time, he completed an undergrad thesis titled "Evaluating Spatiotemporal Search Structures for Lagrangian Basis Flows." TAJO will next head to an internship at Lawrence Livermore, advised by Timo Bremer, and then will go to the Ph.D. program at the University of Utah, advised by Mike Kirby. Congratulations TAJO!!

Hank Childs has received the CIS Department's Best Teacher Award for 2016. The award was chosen based on student nominations from this year's graduating class, and was presented at today's commencement ceremony.

CDUX Ph.D. student Ryan Bleile traveled to New Orleans to present his recent research results at the American Nuclear Society's Annual Meeting. His paper, titled Investigation of Portable Event Based Monte Carlo Transport Using the Nvidia Thrust Library, compared CUDA and Thrust implementations in an effort to understand the costs for taking a hardware-agnostic approach.

CDUX Ph.D. student Brent Lessley traveled to Groningen in the Netherlands to present his recent research results at the EuroGraphics Parallel Graphics and Visualization Symposium. His paper, titled External Facelist Calculation with Data-Parallel Primitives, contributed new algorithms for external facelist calculation based on the data-parallel primitive paradigm. These algorithms are thought to be the first-ever shared-memory algorithms for this problem. Co-authors on the work include CDUX Ph.D. student Roba Binyahib, Rob Maynard of Kitware, and Hank Childs.

Nine CDUX students will be spending their summers at DOE labs. For the second year in a row, every student in the group interested in an internship landed one.
Five of our students will leave Eugene for new settings this summer:

• Ph.D. student Roba Binyahib will head to Argonne National Laboratory to work with Tom Peterka on distributed-memory visualization techniques.
• Ph.D. student Brent Lessley will head to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to work with Wes Bethel on shared-memory parallel visualization techniques.
• Ph.D. student Samuel Li will head to Los Alamos National Laboratory to work with Chris Sewell on VTK-m.
• Undergraduate TAJO will head to Lawrence Livermore National Lab, to work with Timo Bremer on performance visualization. He will then head to the University of Utah to begin the Ph.D. program there.
• Ph.D. student Sudhanshu Sane will head to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to work with Eric Brugger on in situ processing.

Four students have already been doing their research remotely, and will continue doing so:

• Ph.D. student James Kress has been at Oak Ridge Laboratory since June of 2015, and will continue his research from Tennessee this summer.
• Ph.D. student Ryan Bleile won the Livermore Graduate Research Fellowship in May of 2015, and has been conducting his research from LLNL for the last year.
• Ph.D. student Stephanie Labasan also won the Livermore Graduate Research Fellowship in May of 2015. Before starting her fellowship, she spent one year at Intel working with the RAPL group. She will now head down to LLNL to begin her fellowship.
• Ph.D. student Matt Larsen has a staff position at Lawrence Livermore, and is in the process of completing his dissertation.

Finally, M.S. student Vincent Chen will do a summer internship at Amazon in Toronto.

The University of Oregon's online magazine, Cascade, published an interview with Hank Childs about the computer graphics class he teaches. The conversation focused on how the class has been helping UO undergraduates land jobs.

Undergrad researcher Kirsten Dawes graduated with her BS from UO in March, and will begin as a Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee in the Fall. In the interim, she will continue working with CDUX, now as a staff member. Kirsten has worked on the Intel Parallel Computing Center project for the last two years, and will continue doing so for the next five months. Congratulations Kirsten!!

Undergrad researcher Ouermi Timbwaoga Aime Judicael (TAJO) has been accepted to the Ph.D. program at the University of Utah and will enroll there after graduation from UO. He will be working with Mike Kirby. Congratulations TAJO!!

M.S. student Sudhanshu Sane has accepted an offer to begin as a CDUX Ph.D. student in Fall 2016. Sudhanshu is already a CDUX member, as an M.S. student. He will be exploring efficient flow visualization for his dissertation research. Welcome (again) Sudhanshu!

Ph.D. student Nicole Marsaglia has joined our team. Nicole is in the middle of her second year as a Ph.D. student. Nicole is still deciding on her research topic, but is leaning toward in situ compression. Welcome Nicole!

The University of Oregon Graduate School selected James Kress to be featured on their website. Congrats to James on the nice article, which includes details on his extended internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Congratulations to Matt Larsen, who begins his new staff position as a Computer Scientist at Lawrence Livermore this week! His job assignment will build on his Ph.D. work, including in situ visualization, rendering, and optimizing performance on many-core devices. Matt will continue in the Ph.D. program as a remote student, and will complete his dissertation from LLNL.

M.S. student Sudhanshu Sane has joined our team. Sudhanshu is in the middle of his second year as an M.S. student, and he plans to transition into the Ph.D. program in Fall '16. Sudhanshu is still deciding on his research topic, but is leaning towards flow visualization. Welcome Sudhanshu!

Congratulations to Shaomeng (Samuel) Li for being selected for NCAR's Advanced Study Program! This program funds student researchers to spend time at NCAR's campus to work with NCAR researchers. Samuel will spend January thru March of 2016 in Boulder, CO working with John Clyne of NCAR, where they will continue looking at compression of scientific data sets using wavelets.

CDUX participated in many activities at the SC15 conference:

• James Kress and Matt Larsen presented their research papers at the ISAV workshop.
• Kirsten Dawes, Hang Xu, Elliott Ewing, and Hank Childs all contributed to a demonstration of VisIt running on the Xeon Phi, along with Alok Hota and Jian Huang of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The demo was shown at Intel's HPC Developers Conference and at the UTK booth on the showroom floor.
• Samuel Li co-chaired a panel on student engagement in HPC.
• Hank Childs presented at four different venues:
  • "Optimizing VisIt for Next Generation Architectures" at Intel's HPC Developer's Conference, along with Jian Huang.
  • The tutorial "Effective HPC Visualization and Data Analysis using VisIt," along with Cyrus Harrison (organizer), David Pugmire, Rob Sisneros, and Amit Chourasia.
  • A lightning talk at ISAV on the need for standardizing in situ terms.
  • The Birds-of-a-Feather "Planning for Visualization on the Xeon Phi," along with Paul Navratil, Aaron Knoll, and Ingo Wald. Hank also organized this BOF.

Two CDUX Ph.D. students presented their research results at the ISAV workshop, held in conjunction with SC15 in Austin, TX.

• James Kress presented Loosely Coupled In Situ Visualization: A Perspective on Why it's Here to Stay, a position paper describing why the loosely-coupled form of in situ is likely to play a large going forward. Co-authors on the effort included David Pugmire, Scott Klasky, Norbert Podhorszki, and Jong Choi of Oak Ridge, and Hank Childs.
• Matt Larsen presented Strawman - A Batch In Situ Visualization and Analysis Infrastructure for Multi-Physics Simulation Codes, which presented a mini-app for in situ visualization. Co-authors on the effort included Eric Brugger, Kevin Griffin, and Cyrus Harrison of LLNL, Jim Eliot of AWE, and Hank Childs.

Three CDUX Ph.D. students presented their research results at the IEEE Large Data Analysis and Visualization Symposium in Chicago, IL:

• Stephanie Labasan presented Exploring Tradeoffs Between Power and Performance for a Scientific Visualization Algorithm, which explored the three-dimensional space of execution time, power, and energy when modifying clock frequency. Co-authors on the effort included Matt Larsen and Hank Childs.
• Samuel Li presented Evaluating the Efficacy of Wavelet Configurations on Turbulent-Flow Data, which explored best practices in wavelet compression from the image processing community and used quantitative evaluations over several domain-specific analyses. Co-authors on the effort included John Clyne of NCAR, Kenny Gruchalla of NREL, Kristi Potter, and Hank Childs.
• James Kress presented A Visualization Pipeline for Large-Scale Tractography Data, which explored a clustering-based pipeline for reducing both the scale and the complexity of neural tract data. Co-authors on the effort included Erik Anderson of EGI and Hank Childs.

M.S. student Vincent Chen has joined our team. Vincent comes to us from the University of Toronto. He has previously participated in research on 3D scanning and printing. Vincent will be working on techniques for ray-tracing for scientific visualization. Welcome Vincent!

Undergraduate student Ouermi Timbwaoga Aime Judicael (TAJO) has officially joined CDUX, after spending this past summer doing research with our team. TAJO is researching interpolation of Lagrangian particle tracers. He is double majoring in computer science and physics. Welcome TAJO!

M.S. student Hang Xu has joined our team. Hang has been at UO for two years, and plans to transition into the Ph.D. program. Hang will research visualization techniques on the Intel Xeon Phi in the context of the VisIt visualization program, with foci on cache usage and vector utilization. Welcome Hang!

Hank Childs gave an invited presentation at the International Computing for the Atmospheric Sciences Symposium (iCAS2015) in Annecy, France today. The presentation focused on exascale visualization issues, including upcoming drivers for in situ processing, and ideas for transforming and reducing data for later exploration, such as wavelet compression and Lagrangian particle tracers.

Four CDUX Ph.D. students (Brent Lessley, James Kress, Matt Larsen, and Ryan Bleile) attended the VTK-m code sprint in Livermore, CA, along with Hank Childs. Our students made up two thirds of all attending students, and they spent the two days interacting with leaders in the VTK-m project, including Ken Moreland, Rob Maynard, Jeremy Meredith, Chris Sewell, Berk Geveci, and others. The VTK-m project is an effort to update the popular VTK software for advanced architectures. CDUX has been one of the leading academic institutions in contributing code and conducting research in this new effort.

Hank Childs received the Best Teacher Award at the CIS Department's commencement ceremony. The award was selected based on student nominations from the graduating class of 2015.

Matt Larsen received the J. Donald Hubbard Family Scholarship in Computer and Information Science at the CIS Department's commencement ceremony. This scholarship is awarded to students who show an interest in human-computer interaction, computer graphics, or multimedia. Congratulations Matt!

Hank Childs and Hamish Carr led a summer school on visualization in Warrington, England. The course was part of the Hartree Centre's Summer School series. The school consisted of five days of lectures and hands on exercises. Hank presented material for two of the five days, including exercises on parallel visualization. Other presenters were Robert Laramee of Swansea, David Pugmire of Oak Ridge, and Valerio Pascucci of the University of Utah.

Eight CDUX students are heading off for summer internships. This includes every student in the group who wanted to pursue an internship.

• Ph.D. student James Kress will return to Oak Ridge Lab, to work with David Pugmire on in situ visualization. James will spend fifteen months at ORNL, embedding with a simulation team in an effort to understand the viability of in situ for their workflows.
• Ph.D. student Samuel Li will head to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, to work with John Clyne on wavelet compression.
• Undergraduate Kirsten Dawes will head to Lawrence Livermore National Lab, to work with Jeff Keasler on parallel computing.
• Undergraduate Elliott Ewing will head to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, to work with David Camp on optimizing visualization workloads on the Xeon Phi.
• Ph.D. student Matt Larsen will head to Lawrence Livermore National Lab, to work with Eric Brugger on using ray-tracing in an in situ setting.
• Ph.D. student Brent Lessley was accepted into the Google Summer of Code, which sponsors students to contribute on open source projects. Brent will work with Rob Maynard of Kitware, Inc. and Ken Moreland of Sandia National Lab. His project focuses on efficient usage of modern architectures within the VTK-m framework.
• Ph.D. student Ryan Bleile will return to Lawrence Livermore National Lab, to work with Patrick Brantley and Matt O'Brien. This internship, lined up before he was awarded a Lawrence Graduate Scholar Fellowship, will also research Monte Carlo methods. Ryan will begin his Fellowship at LLNL when his internship ends.
• Ph.D. student Stephanie Labasan will head to Intel, to work with the RAPL power team in Hillsboro, OR. Stephanie was originally headed to LLNL prior to being awarded the Lawrence Graduate Scholar Fellowship, but opted to delay the start of her Fellowship to embed with Intel's power group.

Hank was promoted to Associate Professor and has been granted indefinite tenure. The promotion has been announced by the Department, and will take effect on September 15, 2015.

Hank received the University of Oregon Research Excellence Award for Outstanding Early Career, which is the highest university award for early career faculty. Only two awards were made campus-wide. More information on the award can be found here.

CDUX Ph.D. student Matt Larsen traveled to Cagliari, Italy to present his recent research results at the EuroGraphics Parallel Graphics and Visualization Symposium. His paper, titled Volume Rendering Via Data-Parallel Primitives Parallel Framework, contributed a new volume rendering algorithm based on the data-parallel primitive paradigm. His algorithm is raycasting-based and operates on unstructured meshes. Co-authors on the work include CDUX Ph.D. student Stephanie Labasan, Paul Navratil of TACC, Jeremy Meredith of Oak Ridge Lab, and Hank Childs.

Two CDUX Ph.D. students, Ryan Bleile and Stephanie Labasan, have received Lawrence Graduate Scholar Fellowships. This Fellowship is highly competitive and this is thought to be the first time that two awards went to members of the same research group. The fellowship will fund the remainder of their Ph.D.'s, and both students will relocate to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to work with co-advisors at LLNL. Stephanie's proposal, "Optimal Power Scheduling for Visualization on Supercomputers" was sponsored by Barry Rountree and Peer-Timo Bremer. Ryan's proposal, "Simulating Monte Carlo Nuclear Particle Transport On Advanced Computing Architectures" was sponsored by Patrick Brantley and Matthew O'Brien.

Kristi Potter and her colleagues were notified that their workshop proposal at IEEE Visualization 2015 was accepted. The workshop is titled "Visualization for Decision Making Under Uncertainty" and will be held in October in Chicago, IL.

CDUX Ph.D. student Matt Larsen traveled to Hangzhou, China to present his recent research results at the IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium. His paper, titled Ray-Tracing Within a Data Parallel Framework, demonstrated that the data-parallel primitive approach, currently en vogue for visualization on modern architectures, can achieve excellent performance with ray-tracing, an algorithm that has both unstructured memory accesses and high computational load. Co-authors on the work include Paul Navratil of TACC, Jeremy Meredith of Oak Ridge Lab, and Hank Childs.

Hank Childs traveled to Singapore to deliver an invited presentation, titled "Data Exploration at the Exascale," at the Supercomputing Frontiers Conference. Hank also delivered a second talk, titled "Exascale Visualization: Why Portable Performance Will Change Visualization Software," on behalf of collaborator Ken Moreland of Sandia Lab.

CDUX Ph.D. student Samuel Li received one of the Best Paper awards at the SPIE Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis in San Francisco, CA. Samuel's paper was titled Exploring Visualization Designs Using Phylogenetic Trees. This publication was a continuation of his M.S. research at Tufts University, where he was advised by Remco Chang. Remco and several other Tufts students were co-authors on the paper, along with Hank Childs.

Ph.D. student Brent Lessley has joined our team. Brent had previously focused on machine learning and he plans to research directions at the intersection of Big Data, machine learning, and scientific visualization. Brent will initially study many-core visualization in the VTK-m library.

We wish Erik Anderson all the best, as he relocates from Eugene to Boston for his job at EGI. We will continue our collaboration on tractography visualization with Erik remotely.

Hank Childs traveled to Goa, India to present recent research results at the IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC). The work, titled Particle Advection Performance Over Varied Architectures and Workloads, studied performance of flow visualization workloads over diverse workloads. Co-authors on the work include three researchers from UO -- Scott Biersdorff, David Poliakoff, and Prof. Allen Malony -- and David Camp from Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

Ryan Bleile, Kirsten Dawes, and students from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville pulled together a successful demo for the Intel booth at the ACM/IEEE SuperComputing (SC14) conference in New Orleans, LA. The demonstration highlighted recent successes from our team's Intel Parallel Computing Center. Specifically, the demo showed VisIt running on an Intel Xeon Phi, doing significant computation on the Phi, and rendering with Intel's SWR library on Xeon CPUs.

Hank Childs was part of the team that received Best Paper at LDAV in Paris. The work, titled Improved Post Hoc Flow Analysis Via Lagrangian Representations, came out of the research from Hank's Early Career Award. The work compares the traditional paradigm for exploring unsteady state flow --- saving time slices and interpolating velocity fields between these time slices --- with a new one. The new paradigm employs Lagrangian tracers in situ during simulation execution and then interpolates positions between these tracers. The paper's experiments showed that the Lagrangian approach is faster, more accurate, and takes less storage than the traditional approach.

The Department of Energy has funded the XVis team to pursue research topics on exascale visualization. The team is led by Ken Moreland of Sandia, and includes partners at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Kitware, UC Davis, and CDUX. Funding for this grant runs through 2017.

Hank Childs and Hamish Carr led a summer school on visualization for the Hartree Centre in Warrington, England. The school consisted of five days of lectures and hands on exercises. Hank presented material for two of the five days, including exercises on parallel visualization.

Roba Binyahib has officially joined CDUX. Roba's interests are in visualization of large data sets. She previously completed a M.S. degree at KAUST, and worked for Saudi Aramco.

Kirsten Dawes and Elliott Ewing joined CDUX. They will work as part of the Intel Parallel Computing Center, optimizing the VisIt visualization tool for the Intel Xeon Phi.

Hank Childs and Kristi Potter both participated in a week-long seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl on Scientific Visualization in Wadern, Germany. Hank presented on the topic of exascale visualization, and Kristi presented on uncertainty visualization.

CDUX member Ryan Bleile accepted an internship with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA for summer 2014. He will be working with Shawn Dawson in the B Division code group on Monte Carlo Transport in the many core space.

CDUX will be part of an Intel Parallel Computing Center aimed at making the VisIt visualization software excel on Intel's Xeon Phi architecture. This project is in collaboration with Sean Ahern and Jian Huang at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

CDUX member Jordan Weiler has accepted an offer to join Emberex in Eugene, OR as a full-time developer after his June graduation. He will be supporting a large project involved with Cengage Learning.

CDUX member Matt Larsen accepted an internship with Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN for summer 2014. He will be working with Jeremy Meredith in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division on the development of EAVL (Extreme-scale Analysis and Visualization Library) volume renderer.

CDUX member James Kress accepted an internship with Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN for summer 2014. He will be working with Dave Pugmire in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division on the development and extension of EAVL (Extreme-scale Analysis and Visualization Library).

Hank Childs taught a short course titled Visualization and Analysis of Very Large Data for the EU Regional School being held in Aachen, Germany. Hank also gave invited talks at RWTZ-Aachen and the Julich Supercomputing Centre (JSC).

CDUX member Stephanie Labasan accepted an internship with Intel in Hillsboro, OR for summer 2014. She will be working on software for energy and power analysis in the Software and Services Group.

Kristi Potter gave a colloquium talk at the School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Oregon State University on the visualization of statistical uncertainty. In addition to the talk, she also spent the day meeting with faculty and staff.

Hank Childs participated in a week-long seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl on Connecting Performance Analysis and Visualization to Advance Extreme Scale Computing in Wadern, Germany. Hank presented material on the lessons learned from scientific visualization, how these lessons might benefit performance visualization, and motivated the presentation by describing some of his experiences visualizing the performance of his own programs.

CIS Ph.D. student Matthew Larsen joined CDUX today. Matt is passionate about computer graphics and will work on the GraviT ray-tracing project.

Funding from Conoco Phillips arrived today. We will work with Kelly Gaither and her team from TACC to develop new visualization software for CoP. Our team will be extending VisIt to meet the overall project needs.

Hank Childs participated in the tutorial Effective HPC Visualization and Data Analysis using VisIt at the SC13 conference in Denver, CO. The tutorial was organized by Cyrus Harrison of Lawrence Livermore. This was the fourth tutorial on VisIt presented at the SC conference.

Hank Childs will serve as Papers Co-Chair for the 4th IEEE Symposium on Large Data Analysis and Visualization, which will be co-located with IEEE Vis Week in Paris, France in November of 2014. Renato Pajarola and Venkat Vishwanath will also serve as Papers Co-Chairs.

Hank Childs organized and participated in a panel at the IEEE Visualization conference in Atlanta, GA. The panel, titled "Challenges for Scientific Visualization Software," focused on challenges such as programming models for future architectures, maximizing performance for future architectures, application architecture and data management, data models, and rendering. The panel was inspired by the paper Hank and others wrote for Computer Magazine in May of 2013.

James Kress was selected to be a member of the Graduate Student Advisory Board on campus. The mission of the board is to help the Graduate School create a supportive community for graduate students, provide workshops that enhance the quality of the graduate experience, and identify and share resources for professional development. This board consists of 25 members representing all of the schools on campus, of which he is one of only two from the STEM fields, and the only one for computer science. This will be a recurring position for the next five years.

Three of our incoming Ph.D. students -- James Kress, Stephanie Labasan, and Ryan Bleile -- began at UO and their research with CDUX today. We also welcomed second year Master's student, Jordan Weiler. Our fourth incoming Ph.D. student, Samuel Li, arrived in June and has already begun his research.

The NSF announced that they would fund the SI2 proposal "A Comprehensive Ray Tracing Framework for Visualization in Distributed-Memory Parallel Environments." Our project team will develop the "GraviT" library, which will provide very high quality graphics for very large data sets and be deployable within scientific visualization tools and on diverse platforms. The project is led by Paul Navratil of TACC and also includes partners at ParaTools, Inc and the University of Utah. The library will build on the work that Paul and Hank won best paper for at EGPGV 2012 in Cagliari, Italy.

Hank Childs delivered one of the keynote presentations at the 18th International Workshop on Vision, Modeling, and Visualization (VMV 2013), held in Lugano, Switzerland. The presentation was titled "Hybrid Parallelism For Visualization" and discussed Hank's recent research on the topic and its connection to exascale visualization.

Our naming contest came to an end and the winning entry, from James Kress, is CDUX: Computing and Data Understanding at eXtreme Scale. CDUX -- pronounced "sea ducks", which is a play on the University of Oregon team name -- barely beat out Stephanie Labasan's suggestion of CVESL ("sea vessel") in a vote by group members. James was awarded an Amazon gift card.

The SDAV Institute has issued a sub-contract to the University of Oregon to help meet its mission of delivering cutting-edge visualization and analysis software to Department of Energy users. Hank previously was parted of SDAV during his time at Lawrence Berkeley, and serves on the team's Executive Council and as the Chair of its Software Committee. Funding for this grant runs through 2017.

We are pleased to announce that Erik Anderson will help direct the CDUX research group. Erik recently moved to Eugene to research issues with medical visualization at Electrical Geodesics, Inc., and also will have a courtesy faculty appointment in the CIS Department. Erik received his Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Utah.

The Department of Energy has transferred Hank Childs' Early Career Award to the University of Oregon. The research for this grant focuses on exascale visualization are is described in depth here. Funding for this grant runs through 2017.

Kristi Potter has finally joined us at the University of Oregon. She will work as the visualization evangelist for the UO campus as part of CASSPR and also will have a courtesy faculty appointment in the CIS Department. Kristi will also help direct the CDUX research group. Hank heavily recruited Kristi to take the job, and said that they would form a research group together (CDUX). She received her Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Utah.

Hank Childs served as the site chair for the Department of Energy Computer Graphics Forum. The meeting, which was attended by approximately thirty Department of Energy visualization experts, was held at the Benson Hotel in Portland, OR, and was organized by UO.

Hank Childs delivered an invited presentation at the KAUST Visualization Summit, held on the KAUST campus in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. Hank presented an overview of the challenges for exascale visualization.

All four Ph.D. offers made by the CDUX team were accepted. We are excited to welcome (in order of acceptance):

• James Kress, outstanding computer science graduate from Boise State University.
• Samuel Li, who received an M.S. from Tufts University working with Remco Chang.
• Ryan Bleile, outstanding computer science graduate from the University of the Pacific.
• Stephanie Labasan, outstanding computer engineering graduate from the University of the Pacific.

Hank Childs has joined the University of Oregon, as an assistant professor. He will be shared with the visualization group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he was worked since 2009. He leaves UC Davis, where he worked with the IDAV research group, also since 2009. Prior to that, Hank worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1999 to 2009.