October 2006
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Winner of an R&D 100 Award, Sapphire Helps Find Useful Data
One of the great challenges researchers face today is extracting the information they need from enormous data sets. A Lawrence Livermore team, partly funded through ASC’s Pre- and Post-Processing Environment (PPPE) effort, has developed analysis algorithms allowing the exploration of large, complex, and multidimensional data sets. The technology has been dubbed Sapphire and recently captured one of seven R&D 100 Awards received by Lawrence Livermore from the trade journal R&D Magazine for being among the top 100 industrial innovations worldwide for 2006.
“Our ability to generate data far outstrips our ability to explore, analyze, and understand it,” said Chandrika Kamath, of the Center for Applied Scientific Computing and leader of the Sapphire project. “Data that were measured in gigabytes (billions of bits of information) until recently, now are being measured in terabytes (trillions of bytes) and will soon approach the petabyte (100,000 trillion bytes) range.
“Often, the data are complex, available either as time-series data, or as images. In order to achieve our scientific goals, we need to fully exploit this data by extracting all the useful information from them. This is the idea behind Sapphire,” Kamath added.
By applying ideas from data mining, video processing, statistics, and pattern recognition, lab researchers are developing new computational tools and techniques to extract useful information from huge data sets.
Sapphire technology is being applied in a variety of disciplines, including plasma physics experiments and simulations, remote sensing imagery, video surveillance, climate simulations, astronomy, and fluid mix experiments and simulations. The lab team has six patents on Sapphire technology.
Sapphire software is being used to characterize and track bubbles and spikes in an 80 terabyte data set from a 3-D, high-fidelity simulation of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability. This image shows the bubble counts using the magnitude of the X-Y velocity at the bubble boundary. Only 1/36 of the 2-D data is displayed.
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