David Ellsworth

CSC
NASA Ames Research Center
David.Ellsworth@nasa.gov

Current Work

I work in the Visualization Group in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at NASA Ames Research Center. I have been working on techniques for visualizing large data sets. One approach I've worked on is out-of-core visualization, which lets you visualize data sets that are too large to load into memory. A lot of this work is part of the Field Encapsulation Library, a templated C++ library of classes for mesh and field data, a similar library called Field Model, and Gel, an interactive visualization application. Some recent work precomputes a huge number of particle trajectories that allows interactive viewing of streaklines for very large data sets. I've also helped put together our group's concurrent visualization system, which sidesteps much of the large data storage issues by computing the visualizations immediately after the data are computed.

Visualization of a 110 GB data set of the Harrier. The data set was provided by Jasim Ahmad, Neal Chaderjian, Scott Murman, and Shishir Pandya, all from NASA Ames Research Center.

Publications

David Ellsworth, Chris Henze, Bryan Green, Patrick Moran, and Timothy Sandstrom, "Concurrent Visualization in a Production Supercomputer Environment", IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proceedings Visualization 2006), Vol. 12, No. 5, Sept.-Oct. 2006, pages 997-1004.

David Ellsworth, Bryan Green, and Patrick Moran, "Interactive Terascale Particle Visualization", in Proceedings of Visualization 2004, Austin, TX, October 2004, pages 353-360. Electronic Copy (pay site)

David Ellsworth, and Patrick Moran, "Accelerating Large Data Analysis By Exploiting Regularities," in Proceedings IEEE Visualization 2003, Seattle, WA, October 2003, pp. 561-568. Electronic Copy (pay site)

David Ellsworth, "Accelerating Demand Paging for Local and Remote Out-of-Core Visualization," Technical Report NAS-01-004, NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division, NASA Ames Research Center, June 2001. Electronic Copy

David Ellsworth, Ling-Jen Chiang, and Han-Wei Shen, "Accelerating Time-Varying Hardware Volume Rendering Using TSP Trees and Color-Based Error Metrics," in Proceedings Volume Visualization and Graphics Symposium 2000, Salt Lake City, UT, October 2000, pp. 119-128. Electronic Copy Presentation Slides Example Movie

Steve Bryson, David Kenwright, Michael Cox, David Ellsworth, and Robert Haimes, "Visually Exploring Gigabyte Data Sets in Real Time," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 42, No. 8, August 1999, pp. 82-90.

Michael Cox and David Ellsworth, "Application-Controlled Demand Paging for Out-of-Core Visualization," Proceedings of Visualization '97, Phoenix, AZ, October 1997, pp. 235-244. NASA technical report

Michael Cox and David Ellsworth, "Managing Big Data for Scientific Visualization," ACM SIGGRAPH '97 Course #4, Exploring Gigabyte Datasets in Real-Time: Algorithms, Data Management, and Time-Critical Design, Los Angeles, CA, August 1997.

Earlier Work

Before I came to NASA, I was a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I worked in the Pixel-Planes Group, which researched high-performance graphics hardware architectures. My dissertation was on software algorithms for parallel polygon rendering.

Publications

David Ellsworth, Polygon Rendering for Interactive Visualization on Multicomputers, Ph.D. Dissertation, Computer Science Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996. Electronic copy (6.6 MB)

Steve Molnar, Michael Cox, David Ellsworth, and Henry Fuchs, "A Sorting Classification of Parallel Rendering," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 14, No. 4, July 1994, pp. 23-32. Electronic copy (draft)

David Ellsworth, "A New Algorithm for Interactive Graphics on Multicomputers," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 14, No. 4, July 1994, pp. 33-40 (updated version of the next paper). Electronic Copy (pay site)

David Ellsworth, "A Multicomputer Polygon Rendering Algorithm for Interactive Applications," Proceedings of the 1993 Parallel Rendering Symposium, San Jose, CA, October 1993, pp. 43-48.

David Ellsworth, Howard Good, and Brice Tebbs, "Distributing Display Lists on a Multicomputer," Computer Graphics (Proceedings of the 1990 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, Snowbird, Utah, March 1990), Vol. 24, No. 2, March 1990, pp.147-155. Electronic Copy (pay site)

Henry Fuchs, John Poulton, John Eyles, Trey Greer, Jack Goldfeather, David Ellsworth, Steve Molnar, Greg Turk, and Laura Israel, "A Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Graphics System Using Processor-Enhanced Memories," Computer Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '89), Vol. 23, No. 3, pp 79-88. Electronic copy

Last Update: 2/19/09