Collaborative Projects
DIGISCOPE
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DIGISCOPE is a high-performance visualization infrastructure for collaborative interaction with extremely large data sets and computation. The goal is to deploy a collection of interactive visualization platforms interconnected by a high-performance telepresence network for remote collaboration. DIGISCOPE will also be connected to several high-performance computing platforms including Teratec, Ecole Centrale and Maison de la Simulation.
DIGISCOPE will be used by:
• researchers in Interaction, Visualization, Simulation and Modeling to develop new interactive visualization techniques to explore, understand and collaborate on massive data sets and computations;
• researchers in all scientific disciplines (physics, astrophysics, life sciences, engineering) to support their needs for analysis of experimental data and simulations;
• corporations, both large and small, to help them develop new products and services, to manage product life cycles and to support decision making;
• professors and educators to integrate these new tools into their teaching and to familiarize students with their use.
DIGISCOPE has been selected with 51 other projects among the 336 projects submitted to the “Equipment of Excellence” (EquipEx) call for projects by the French government. The 6.7 million Euros funding will allow the installation or upgrade of 9 visualization rooms as well as their networking.
DIGISCOPE is in fact an “equipment project” which means the funding is entirely dedicated to the purchase and maintenance of hardware still it is indeed implied that it will support actual scientific projects. Hence it aims primarily at 4 application domains each involving the management of a growing amount of data:
• Support for scientific research in all fields
• The design, modeling and simulation of complex objects, the product’s life cycle management
• Visual data-mining for decision support, economic intelligence and crisis management
• Teaching and training
Within this framework the partners are expected to regroup and develop research projects that will rely on the DIGISCOPE infrastructure.
The expected results of DIGISCOPE are the following:
• A unique set of hardware platforms for interaction, visualization and collaboration featuring diverse trade-offs in terms of size and resolution of the displays, interaction technology, etc. and supporting remote collaboration across heterogeneous systems;
• Open-sourced software featuring
- a scalable architecture for sharing large visualizations across multiple nodes and real-time compositing of multiple sources;
- a flexible toolkit that supports a wide range of input devices for specific tasks such as pointing, navigation, manipulation;
• A set of novel interaction, visualization and collaboration techniques validated through real-world applications;
• A set of modeling and simulation techniques that scale up and support real-time interaction;
• A number of case studies drawn from outside users from academia and industry, and hopefully a number of scientific result or industrial advances that would not have been possible without DIGISCOPE;
• A flow of Master and PhD-level students who will have taken courses using DIGISCOPE followed and defended a DIGISCOPE-based innovation project in collaboration both with academic partners and/or sponsoring companies;
• Ideally, technology transfer to a start-up or an existing company, and interoperability with a larger network of outside nodes.
Each visualization platforms is expected to be quite unique as each will help address rather specific scientific problematics. More to the point the networking of this heterogeneous set of platforms is a remarkable feature of the project and is expected to bring new questions and answers about the future of collaboration.
For the OVSQ-UVSQ platform, the UVSQ decided to provide the project with an additional engineer who will be responsible for the hardware purchase and installation processes as well as the first software layers, allowing the scientists to run their own softwares on the platform. The UVSQ also funded a PhD student who will investigate the opportunities offered by such equipment for the collaborative exploration of post-normal issues.