96-16969 Roman, Gruia-Catalin Hubbard, P. M. Washington University in St. Louis CISE Research Instrumentation: Effective Visual Presentation of Computer Generated Information The instrumentation grant will fund four SGI graphics workstations connected to a high speed communication network to provide a testbed configuration supporting four projects whose common goal is to enhance the computer's ability to communicate information in visual form for human consumption. Query -Based Visualization of Distributed Computations- Visualization for Network Management- Practical Computational Geometry- Time Critical Graphics Operations. Query-based visualization is a technique that allows one to explore an executing distributed computation in a totally visual environment. A graphical vocabulary is used to formulate questions about and construct answers regarding the state of the computation. This will lead to a novel perspective on visual debugging and monitoring of distributed software. The network visualization, management, and control project seeks to explore the use of visualization and interactive steering in an environment characterized by high-speed, high-volume data production and a demand for rapid response. The techniques developed in this work will be applicable to a wide range of complex applications that can benefit from human-directed, dynamic adjustment of parameters. Practical computational geometry project deals with the issues of simplicity and robustness in geometric algorithms, seeking a theoretical understanding of fundamental problems in computer graphics, computational biology, and visualization. Finally, time-critical computer graphics is a research effort to develop graphical operations such as rendering and collision detection that adapt to resource limitations with minimal impact on human performance.
