The GVU Center has three missions: education, service, and research. In our educational role, we teach the principles and methods of computer graphics, visualization, and usability to members of the academic community ranging from undergraduate students to graduate students and faculty.
Center members teach dozens of courses and seminars. Our service mission is carried out through the Scientific Visualization Lab, a joint undertaking with Information Technology (the campus-wide computer service), to provide state of the art computer graphics hardware and software capabilities to the entire Georgia Tech community. Currently, over 150 faculty, graduate students and staff use the visualization lab's facilities. Our research spans the areas of realistic imagery, medical imaging, image understanding, animation, user interface software, usability, stereo graphics, image quality, and expert systems in graphics and user interfaces. The twenty faculty and staff who are currently actively developing the lab's programs are drawn from Psychology, Mechanical Engineering, Office of Interdisciplinary Programs, Physics, Mathematics, Information Technology, and the College of Computing. An active seminar series and brown-bag lunches brings us together every week to discuss current research topics.
By integrating these three missions together in a single unit, the Center is developing a highly interactive and collaborative environment where researchers unfamiliar with computer graphics can come for help in integrating scientific visualization into their research work, graphics experts and graduate students can share their knowledge with one another and find new and interesting problems on which to work, and students can learn in a melting pot of closely related ideas and collaborations between researchers from multiple disciplines. This intellectually-stimulating environment, complemented by over 30 workstations and other pieces of equipment and over 1200 square feet of lab space, provides a paradigm for the use of interactive computer graphics systems which will be necessary for engineering and scientific research in the 21st century.
The Scientific Visualization Laboratory is operated by the Scientific Visualization Group in the Client Services Department of the Office of Information Technology (OIT).
The facilities are available without charge to all faculty and students engaged in scientific or engineering research.
The lab has graphics workstations, servers, color laser printers, and other peripherals. These are listed in the Hardware section. Also listed in an accompanying section is the Software in the lab. The Sun, SGI, and NT workstations in the GVU Center are accessible with the same account and password used in the SciVis Lab and may be used by SciVis Lab users on a time available basis. Users may apply for accounts on the workstations in the GVU Center by contacting Keven Haynes (keven@cc.gatech.edu) or Steve Park (spark@cc.gatech.edu).
It is our desire that the Scientific Visualization Lab maintains an open and interactive environment where the users feel free to ask each other questions, and to share experiences and software. We will do our part to develop this environment by building libraries of software and providing some expertise (or telling you where you can get it). It may be that once developed, this environment will foster full-scale collaborative efforts that wed different disciplines in the solution of visualization problems. We are already starting some of these efforts by working with computer graphics faculty on selected scientific visualization problems. With the rapid growth in computer graphics faculty and the planned implementation of an academic program in computer graphics and visualization, the potential for further collaboration in this area is great.
Below is a map of the GVU Lab.
FIGURE 1: GVU/Sci-Vis Lab Map.
GVU Lab accounts require the sponsorship and signature of a GVU faculty member. You will be able to access all of the systems in the GVU Lab, including the SciVis Lab systems. Specifically, you will be authorized to access all of the Sun, SGI, and NT workstations as well as the Macintosh systems. The Macintosh systems do not require an account. To obtain a GVU Lab account, use the CoC Account Request Form available outside CoC 213 and check the GVU box in the Facilities section. Return the completed form to either CoC 213 or CoC 210 (slip the form under the door if it's closed).
SciVis Lab accounts require the sponsorship and signature of a Georgia Tech faculty member. You will be able to access all of the systems in the SciVis Lab, which includes all SGI workstations, and the Sun systems in the GVU Lab. To obtain a SciVis Lab account, use the SciVis Account Request Form available outside CoC 210 or in the OIT handout bins in the Rich Building. Return the completed form to either CoC 213 or CoC 210 (slip the form under the door if it's closed). For more information on obtaining a SciVis account, please contact the SciVis manager, Markus DeShon.
As a GVU or SCIVIS user, you automatically get an NT account, however you will need to manually activate your NT account:
E-mail List Description
------------ -----------------------------------------------
gvu-grad GVU Graduate Students working with GVU Faculty.
gvu-coc GVU Faculty members in the Colleg of Computing.
gvu-fac GVU Faculty and Staff members (including
non-CoC).
gvu-others Faculty/Students with GVU lab accounts but not
on SciVis machines.
gvu-all All people involved with the GVU Center (sends
to gvu-fac, gvu-grad, gvu-others and gvu).
gvu-bag GVU Brown Bag Lectures announcements
(sends to gvu-fac, gvu-grad, gvu and
faculty@eedsp.gatech.edu).
scivis-users Scientific Visualization Lab users