DIGISCOPE 2010 Acronyme du projet - Institut Farman - ENS Cachan

APPEL A PROJETS EQUIPEX /
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
2010
DIGISCOPE
SCIENTIFIC SUBMISSION FORM B
CMLA will be the lead laboratory in DIGISCOPE. It brings together 35 researchers, 30 PhD
students, 12 postdocs or research lecturers, 7 technical and administrative staff. The
specificity of the CMLA lies in the multidisciplinarity of its members and in the effective
aspect of the work done in an industrial context. Modeling and numerical simulation play a
role at least as important as mathematical analysis. Any new phenomenon of nature,
technology or mind, is an opportunity for the CMLA's researchers to develop mathematical
models, then to simulate on a computer and finally to achieve a practical application. The
mathematical techniques developed and used come from many areas: PDEs, probabilities
and statistics of course, but also from classical analysis, geometry, algorithmics, and so on.
The policy of the CMLA is to conduct high-level theoretical research while remaining close
to the needs of industry without hesitating to explore the complexity of phenomena and to
move away from academic models. Two major research themes emerge in the CMLA. The
first one is the scientific computation for partial differential equations used in physics and in
fluid mechanics and the other one is the processing and analysis of signals and images.
Maison de la Simulation
With the fast spreading of large computing centers at both the national and European levels,
the French research community now has access to a world leading computing infrastructure.
Such an infrastructure should foster major advances in both fundamental research and
technology. Nevertheless, in order to meet these goals, it is necessary to develop applications
software adapted to a very high degree of parallelism. These high-end applications can only
be developed by gathering multidisciplinary teams, composed of HPC engineers, software
and application specialists. For this reason, the Maison de la Simulation was created under
the joint impulsion of CEA and CNRS. Its main goal is to promote the efficient use by the
scientific community of the available computing infrastructure. For that purpose, the Maison
de la Simulation is developing along three main axes:
• A multidisciplinary research centre dedicated to numerical simulation;
• A service and expertise centre open to the scientific community;
• A nerve centre for education and scientific animation.
With the power of supercomputers increasing exponentially, the simulation of complex
systems at higher spatial and temporal resolution produces very large and complex datasets.
The analysis, exploration and proper understanding of these datasets is a major issue.
Visualization tools should transform complex datasets into readily understandable images;
they should also allow easy exploration and the discovery of regions of particular physical
interest. For this purpose, stereoscopic display and multi-windowing, which allow
visualizing simultaneously several physical properties of the same region, are particularly
useful especially if they can be used in a collaborative manner.
The members of Maison de la Simulation have a long experience in scientific visualization.
They have developed high performance visualization tools, especially for stereoscopic vision.
These tools have been used by many scientists and have contributed to numerous
publications. One of their stereoscopic movies was shown for 6 months at two science
museums in Paris, Palais de la Découverte and Cité des Sciences. The laboratories working with
the Maison de la Simulation that will benefit from the visualization platform span a wide
range of scientific areas: Climate science, Material science, Astrophysics, Plasmas physics
and fusion science.
34/95