As massively parallel, distributed memory systems replace traditional vector supercomputers, effective application program optimization and system resource management become more than research curiosities --- they are crucial to achieving substantial fractions of peak performance for scientific application codes. By recording dynamic activity, either at the application or system software level, one can identify and remove performance bottlenecks. Pablo is a performance analysis environment designed to provide performance data capture, analysis, and presentation across a wide variety of scalable parallel systems. The Pablo environment includes software performance instrumentation, graphical performance data reduction and analysis, and support for mapping performance data to both graphics and sound. Current research directions include complete performance data immersion via head-mounted displays and the integration of Pablo with data parallel Fortran compilers based on the emerging High ...

This paper presents an environment for telecollaborative data exploration. It provides the following capabilities essential to data exploration: (1) Users can probe the data, defining regions of interest with arbitrary shapes. (2) The selected data can be transformed and displayed in many di#erent ways. (3) Linked cursors can be established between several windows showing data sets with arbitrary relationships. (4) Data can be displayed on any screen across a computer network, allowing for telecollaboration arrangements with linked cursors around the world. (5) Our system is user-extensible, allowing programmers to change any component of it while keeping the remaining functionality. We demonstrate how the system can be used in several applications, such as biomedical imaging, robotics, and wood classification.

This document can be read in two ways: as a guide to using the current software, or as a reference manual for those wishing to extend the system to support new features. If you have not yet built and installed the system, before reading further you will probably want to consult Appendix C for installation instructions. The system software (e.g., g++, X11R5/Motif) necessary to build and run Porsonify is described in Appendix B. Throughout this text, the following font conventions are used.

Mathematics is communicated in visual forms, such as algebra and diagrams. This means that blind people are greatly disadvantaged with respect to education and employment in mathematics, science and technology. A number of ideas are presented regarding the representation of mathematics in non-visual formats. In particular, the Mathtalk software for the presentation of algebra in synthetic speech, is described, as is Soundgraph a program which presents the graphs of mathematical functions in speech and non-speech sounds.

This article describes a collaborative project between researchers in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and the Computer Music Project of the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. The project focuses on the use of sound for the exploration and analysis of complex data sets in scientific computing. The article addresses digital sound synthesis in the context of DIASS, a Digital Instrument for Additive Sound Synthesis, and sound visualization in a virtual-reality environment by means of M4CAVE. It describes the procedures and preliminary results of some experiments in scientific sonification and sound visualization. While most computational scientists routinely use visual imaging techniques to explore and analyze large data sets, they tend to be much less familiar with the use of sound. Yet, sound signals carry significant amounts of information and can be used advantageously to increase the bandwidth of the human/computer interface. The pr...

Networks are critical to modern society, and a thorough understanding of how they behave is crucial to their efficient operation. Fortunately, data on networks is plentiful; by visualizing this data, it is possible to greatly improve our understanding. Our focus is on visualizing the data associated with a network and not on simply visualizing the structure of the network itself. We begin with three static network displays; two of these use geographical relationships, while the third is a matrix arrangement that gives equal emphasis to all network links. Static displays can be swamped with large amounts of data; hence we introduce directmanipulation techniques that permit the graphs to continue to reveal relationships in the context of much more data. In effect, the static displays are parameterized so that interesting views may easily be discovered interactively. The software to carry out this network visualization is called SeeNet. 1. INTRODUCTION We are currently in the midst of a...

This report describes the initial phase of a project whose goal is to produce a rich acoustic environment in which the behaviour of multiple independent activities is communicated through perceptually distinguishable auditory streams. While much is known about the perception of isolated auditory phenomena, there are few general guidelines for the selection of auditory elements that can be composed to achieve a display that is effective in situations where the ambient acoustic conditions are uncontrolled. Several auditory illusions and effects are described in the areas of relative pitch discrimination, perception of auditory streams, and the natural association of visual and auditory stimuli. The effects have been evaluated informally through a set of demonstration programs that have been presented to a large and varied audience. Each auditory effect is introduced, suggestions for an effective demonstration are given, and our experience with the demonstration program is summarized. Imp...

This paper describes the second phase in a project exploring the application of sonification to improve the accessibility of spreadsheets. The principal target population of the study has been visually impaired users, though the approach has potential in a range of other application areas, such as the eyes-free monitoring of large data spaces, or to preserve screen space in mobile use. The paper begins by examining previous sonification research relevant to the auditory display of spreadsheets, before briefly reviewing the results and requirements arising from the first phase of this project. Phase 2 of the project began with a more detailed requirement investigation, the results of which are outlined. In particular, the requirement for increased interactivity is examined. The way in which these requirements

This paper describes soundbased representations which have been designed, implemented and evaluated as part of the development of a computer workstation for blind mathematics students. Particular emphasis has been on supporting synthetic speech with non-verbal cues, in the forms of the prosodic component of the speech, `algebra earcons' and spatialized sounds. 2 INTRODUCTION Mathematics is a fundamental discipline. It is the basis of science and technology and is also used widely in other fields, such as social sciences which rely on statistics. Hence, to be excluded from learning and performing mathematics can be a severe handicap. Doing mathematics is very difficult for people with visual disabilities. This is not because they cannot perform the cognitive activity, but because they do not have access to the visual notations that are used to communicate mathematical information. Such communication is essential. Whenever mathematicians gather together, they must use pencil and paper or blackboard and chalk to communicate. While speech is good for communicating many ideas, it is not generally appropriate for the communication of mathematics. At the same time, a lone mathematician working on a problem will also use written notations for self communication. A person's memory is too limited and so the written notation will be used as an external memory, to retain intermediate steps in a proof, for instance. A blind person lacks the external memory and means of communication because non-visual equivalents of written mathematics do not exist. The Maths Project has been sponsored by the European Commission via its Tide Initiative (Technology for the Integration of Disabled and Elderly people) to address this problem. The objective is to build a computer-based workstation for...

While several visualization systems have recently been developed, many application programmers still prefer writing their own code. Why? Because