Brown University has received a Major Research Instrumentation Award for the acquisition of a virtual reality display system (a CAVE), a graphics computer to provide synchronized output to the CAVE, and a large shared-memory computer interconnected to the graphics computer via a high speed link. This equipment will form the core of a shared research computing environment at Brown University. Connectivity to resources available at federally funded computing laboratories will be provided through vBNS connection at Brown. A large array of computer and computational science research projects drawn from computer science, chemistry, cognitive and linguistic sciences, geological sciences, mathematics, and physics will be utilizing the proposed equipment. The research projects range over scientific visualization conducted by the Brown Graphics Group in collaboration with the NSF Science and Technology Center for Graphics and Visualization, interactive graphics in computational fluid mechanics at the Center for Fluid Mechanics, geophysical research on earthquake mechanics using numerical modeling, and condensed matter physics. The equipment will be used by graduate students for research and by undergraduate students in over a dozen courses in at least six different science departments, as well for honors thesis projects. In addition, new course units and new interdisciplinary courses in topics such as computational science, neural networks, and medical imaging will be developed to take advantage of this powerful new facility. Ongoing work by undergraduates that could take advantage of this equipment include projects that span departments such as computational steering, scientific visualization, interaction techniques for immersive virtual reality, and the creation of immersive interactive teaching tools.
