BASKING IN BIG DATA

Visualization software makes viewing and interacting with enormous data sets practical without a supercomputer.This image shows an experiment in which aerogel, a porous material, is bombarded by a micrometeroid traveling at five kilometers per second. Aerogels are commonly used to shield electronic equipment in satellites because they are both durable and extremely light. The Morse-Smale complex identifies the structure of the porous solid as the micrometeroid enters it, providing detailed information about the filament structure of the material.In some ways, science is suffering from too much data. Experiments and computer simulations analyzing everything from the dynamics of climate change to the precise details of folding proteins can churn out billions of numbers describing these physical phenomena. Making sense of all this data remains a challenge.

Recently, however, researchers at the University of California, Davis, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that they have developed software that makes analysis and visualization of huge data sets possible without the aid of a supercomputer. The researchers' algorithm slices up data into more manageable chunks, then stitches it back together on the fly, so that the data can be manipulated in three dimensions, all on a computer with the power and capacity of a high-end laptop. The team's algorithm offers a practical way to get structural information about materials, proteins, and fluids, says Attila Gyulassy, the researcher at UC Davis who led the project. It allows users to "interactively visualize, rotate, apply different transfer functions, and highlight different aspects of the data," he says.