The Visualisation Group, part of the Technology Division within SCD, has been founded to support and maintain visualisation software and skills for large projects and user communities across STFC. We are about to launch a new website and some experiences will be relayed informally.

People involved in this work are: Martin Turner, Terry Hewitt, Rob Allan, Sri Nagella, Ron Fowler and Barry Searle. We also work closely with members of the Virtual Engineering Centre, Lynn Dwyer, Nando Milella and Iain Cant; and other groups across SCD. If you wish to visit (based in the North west location of Daresbury and in Oxfordsire in Harwell) or enquire about using the facilities then please email: hartree@stfc.ac.uk

This includes working with the Hartee Centre hosting their visualisation centres connecting outputs from some of the largest computer in the UK making them human understandable; with the TSB Space Catapult and ESA producing bespoke solutions for their data analytical and command and control needs; creating remote and distance data gathering and visualisation workflows to control the computational processes and providing specialist local high-end equipment within the centres that are near to the main STFC image capturing x-ray, neutron and laser facilities.

The group is working to support the high-end visualisation centres within STFC, with the key objective to consider the human-in-the-loop as an integral part to pre- mid- and post-data visualisation from the major facilities, from archived data stores and from computational simulations. This it is believed is a key component to increasing the efficiency of the major STFC facilities allowing researchers’ work-plans to be controlled, changed and even stopped on the fly.

The group has an emphasis to work in harmony with collaborators across the STFC mission. To this end there are links to strategic partners; as well as the Hartree Centre this includes the Virtual Engineering Centre (University of Liverpool centre based in the Daresbury Labs.), the Harwell Imaging Partnership (based in the RAL campus), the Collaborative Computational Projects (CCPs based across SCD) and a range of projects with other teams and groups within SCD and STFC.

One of the emphasis is on supporting local and national industry, to see how large screens and visualisation can link to their work.

3D Giaia software flythroughs for educational purposes. Use of 3D visualisation to aid the learning process.