Technical and scientific achievements, Industrial and economic impact
1) Technical and scientific achievements
ExaViz will provide an immersive visual analysis environment with specific state-of-the-art functionality for exploring large simulation datasets in both materials science and biomolecular systems.
From a technical point of view, scalability, efficient parallelization and deployment as well as handling large amounts of data are just a few examples of anticipated achievements. We emphasize on concrete scientific applications of this framework that will benefit scientists in experimental as well as theoretical fields by providing two grand challenge applications in biochemistry and a powerful demonstrator in material science. The grand challenge of modeling a complete influenza virion will demonstrate how future exascale computational challenges can be tackled and facilitated by an interactive visual analytics environment. The project will lead to deliverables such as source code for individual components, entire applications or technical reports. This provides a direct measure for the progress of the project and for evaluation. These deliverables target several communities: computer scientists and developers, scientists carrying out frontier simulations in the materials and biomolecular simulation fields and scientists working on specific topics such as neurotransmission or viral infections.
2) Industrial and economic impact.
Work on the GLIC receptor at LBT is supported by the Servier research labs. Once we achieve a mature ExaViz application on this system, we expect immediate interest from this company. Similarly, providing access to the visual analysis results for the complete influenza virus A simulation using the web and mobile ExaViz clients will generate broad interest. Billions of dollars are being spent researching new drug treatments and vaccines for this infection, for which an increased understanding of the virus is vital. Advances, at the fundamental level, in the molecular understanding of materials that the ExaViz project will permit are expected to have important long- to middle-term impacts both in the fields directly addressed in our application challenges and demonstrator (catalysis, biomaterials) and in all other areas of Materials Science. Such detailed understanding of the molecular structure of increasingly complex materials and their roles in the physico-chemical properties is a prerequisite for the predictive design of materials targeting specific macroscopic behaviours and/or performance. Furthermore, the design of the ExaViz platform will be such that it will be possible to integrate any other spectroscopy (Raman, EXAFS... etc.) whose response can be predicted from ab initio or empirical simulations. Follow-up projects with industrial applications are possible. Analytical software and services are broadly used in the pharmaceutical and bioinformatics industry and once ExaViz is tried and tested it will likely generate a lot of interest for commercial applications. This fully agrees with a report of the French Ministry for the Industry, providing clues about the market potential for ExaViz technologies. In 2005/2006 the combined market potential was already superior to 3 Md$, which suggests that it should be straightforward to secure industrial funding in the future.
We also expect an impact on exascale application support in the context of national, European and International efforts. ExaViz will be present to support these initiatives and provide a pilot application for visual analysis.
