Dr. Philip D. Heermann is the Manager of the Data Analysis and Visualization research group at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Also, he is the Sandia Lead for the VIEWS (Visual Interactive Environment for Weapons Simulation) program-element of the ASCI (Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative) and is presently the Tri-lab Lead representing VIEWS for LANL, LLNL and Sandia National Labs. In 1998, Dr. Heermann began promoting Scalable Visualization as the future of visualization for ASCI and by the summer of 2000 research was initiated. Today, Sandia’s research in Scalable Rendering has demonstrated leveraging of commodity graphics cards on a 128 node PC cluster to deliver 1 billion polygons/sec and delivered a 62 million pixel display system driven by a 64 node render cluster. His focus today is improving the rendering cluster technology from limited to full production at Sandia and the development of scalable data handling software and hardware systems to support massive cluster rendering capabilities. His group is also pursing research into next generation data analysis environments and application of the latest programmability of commodity graphics cards. Dr. Heermann received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992.
