A crane places the first pre-built section of the Modular Data Center, the University of Michigan's new Tier One facility. Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar buildings, this state-of-the-art facility uses ambient air for cooling and therefore spends only half the electricity.
The MDC is the future home of Flux, U-M's shared research high-performance computing cluster. The data center is operated by Information and Technology Services, and is expected to open in the summer of 2012. See more photos of the progress. (Photo courtesy of Joel Iverson, ITS)
Ted Hall, from the UM3D lab, navigates through a 3D graph of renal diseases and gene regulation. He assisted Dr. Suresh Bhavnani and UROP student Arunkumaar Ganesan to visualize the graph in the 3D Lab’s MIDEN (Michigan Immersive Digital Experience Nexus). By immersing himself in the complex structure, Dr. Bhavnani was able to discern previously unrecognized patterns of gene regulation.
Bhavnani SK, Ganesan A, Hall TW, Maslowski E, Eichinger F, Martini S, Saxman P, Bellala G, Kretzler M (2010). “Discovering Hidden Relationships Between Renal Diseases and Regulated Genes Through 3D Network Visualizations.” BMC Research Notes 3/296:1-9. (Photo: Suresh Bhavnani)
This image of air flow in the U-M Fishbowl Computing Center illustrates a state of the art technique for sound performance evaluation: calculation of a delay-and-sum beamformer in the time domain. The reconstructed time function recorded by 120 microphones is calculated and displayed in 3D geometry format. This allows the interior measurements of the sound field to be captured and displayed for all surfaces that have complex deep-structured surfaces and sound sources distributed in the space. Photo courtesy of Moji Navvab, Associate Professor of Architecture.
The University of Michigan participates in the ATLAS experiment, an international high-energy physics research project hosted at CERN in Switzerland. The goal of this research is to learn about the basic forces that have shaped our universe since the beginning of time. This image shows a view of the ATLAS cavern, when the particle accelerator was still being assembled.
(Image used with permission: ATLAS Experiment © 2011 CERN)
Andrzej Wierzbicki's lab in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology uses high-throughput genomic sequencing technologies to better understand the process of small RNA-mediated heterochromatin formation. Andrzej participated in a genomics research panel at CI Days. This image shows Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant commonly used to understand genetics. (Photo source: Tico Bassie on Flickr)
Students explore the UM Exhibit Museum of Natural History with mobile computers as part of Zydeco, a new project funded by the National Science Foundation. Students use the devices to capture data and observations in the form of photos, videos, text, and audio. Students tag these data, and it’s synced and stored in a cloud service. Later in the classroom, students use the new Zydeco Explanation iPad app, which structures the process of developing a scientific explanation and allows them to access and integrate their data from the cloud so that they can write an explanation that answers the question that they are exploring. Photo courtesy of Chris Quintana, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Learning Technologies
Network visualization of candidates in the U.S. 2010 midterm elections. Each node (or dot) represents a candidate. Blue corresponds to Democrats, red to Republicans, and yellow to Tea Party members. Edges (or lines) correspond to connections (e.g., follower/followee relationships) on Twitter. Purple edges connect liberal and conservative candidates. Nodes are sized by the number of connections. From "The Party is Over Here: Structure and Content in the 2010 Election," by Avishay Livne, Matthew P. Simmons, Eytan Adar, Lada A. Adamic. ICWSM'11, Barcelona, Spain, July 17-21, 2011.
Simulation of vortex ring instability, showing the structure that develops when an axisymmetric vortex ring is given an azimuthal perturbation. The simulation employed several hundred thousand panels using a vortex sheet panel method. From "Azimuthal instability of a vortex ring computed by a vortex sheet panel method," by Hualong Feng, Leon Kaganovskiy and Robert Krasny, in Fluid Dynamics Research, vol. 41, 051405 (2009)