The award recognizes LANL's advanced visualization capabilities within the new Metropolis Center for Modeling and Simulation. The center supports more than 300 physicists, computer scientists and engineers. Completed in 2001, the visualization facilities allow scientists to see and understand the results of the large data sets they produce – often hundreds of millions of cells in size.

LANL and CEI have developed special features in EnSight Gold software to visualize large-scale computational results in VR environments. The software's remote parallel visualization capability has been especially valuable in LANL's work.

"The scientists find the remote visualization capability to be essential for analyzing terascale problems," says Robert Tomlinson, ASC VIEWS program manager at the Metropolis Center. "They can keep massive amounts of data on the supercomputer where it was generated – whether offsite or in our machine room – and run a client on a local visualization computer here in the Metropolis Center. This makes the visualization of terascale data sets routine."

LANL visualization scientists currently run EnSight Gold on large SGI visualization computers with 16 graphics pipes. CEI and LANL are partnering to develop the ability to visualize ever-growing datasets on both next-generation SGI shared-memory visualization systems and distributed-memory PC cluster visualization systems.

"The award confirms that CEI provides critical technology to LANL's Metropolis Center scientists," says Kent Misegades, CEI president. "We have proven that as a commercial supplier we can deliver a superior product that meets specifications, maintains competitive pricing, and is delivered on time. We are proud that the award also recognizes the collaborative spirit between CEI and LANL."