MASSIVE is the NCI Specialised Facility for Imaging and Visualisation. The NCI Specialised Facilities Program provides a mechanism by which NCI can extend the range of computational services available to the Australian research community by investing in facilities operated by other specialist providers of high-end computational resources.
 
Access to the MASSIVE facility will be available Australia-wide through the NCI Merit Allocation Scheme (MAS) and services will be provided from May 2011. Researchers who are interested in accessing MASSIVE facilities are invited to submit an application to the NCI MAS for 2011. Please find the call for applications here.
 

The MASSIVE project will provide researchers with:

• Two high performance computing facilities, located at the Australian Synchrotron and Monash University, that will be designed for data processing and visualisation;
• Specialised imaging and visualisation software and databases;
• Expertise in visualisation, image processing, image analysis and GPU computing.

Allocations are made in Service Units which corresponds to one hour of elapsed time on one processor-core of the system at "normal" priority.
 
Applicants will be required to estimate their SU requirements. For parallel jobs, this can be done by multiplying the number of hours that an application runs, by the number of processor cores that it uses, by the number of runs that will be required during the allocation process.
 
For interactive desktop use, users will be able to schedule time on specialised visualisation nodes that will support 8 or 12 processor cores and 2 visualisation GPUs. Users should request interactive use seperately and indicate the number of hours of interactive use requested.
 
The MASSIVE high performance computers will be suited to:

• Fast data processing, in particular image processing and analysis;
• Interactive visualisation where users will pre-book nodes to use scientific visualisation packages; and
• Modelling and simulation, in particular problems suited to GPU parallelisation.
• Non-interactive visualisation, allowing users to render large datasets or simulations;
• Large-scale visualisation problems requiring multiple nodes and GPUs for data processing and rendering.

 
Users of the MASSIVE system are expected from a wide range of fields, including:
Medicine, computational biology and bioengineering, synchrotron and X-ray science, multi and hyper-spectral imaging, electron microscopy and material science, computational fluid mechanics, neuroscience, developmental and regenerative biology, molecular biology, geoscience, astrophysics, and nanotechnology.
 
The MASSIVE facilities will be particularly suited to:

• Researchers processing, analysing and viewing data generated by advanced imaging equipment, such as the Australian Synchrotron Imaging Beamline, new generation Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and other techniques.
• Scientists who generate, analyse and visualise large multidimensional datasets, including those that are produced by imaging or simulation;
• Researchers who are applying advanced image processing, image analysis, or visualisation techniques, or undertaking research in these fields;
• Scientists applying computer tomography techniques or volume visualisation and analysis techniques.
• Researchers running or developing modelling and simulation applications, in particular applications which are suited to fast IO or GPU hardware;  
• Scientists who analyse, process and visualise multi-spectral, hyperspectral data or multi-modal data.

 
Contact:
For specific and expert assistance, of relevance to the application process, please contact Wojtek James Goscinski (massive-coordinator@monash.edu).
 
Software supported on the MASSIVE clusters will include:

Image processing and analysis software

• CImg - An open source C++ library for image processing.
• ImageJ - Image processing and analysis tools for Java
• Open Computer Vision Library - The Open Computer Vision library is a collection of implemented algorithms and examples for real time image processing.
• ITKSNAP - SNAP is a software application used to segment structures in 3D medical images. It provides semi-automatic segmentation using active contour methods, as well as manual delineation and image navigation.
• BioImage Suite - Suite of tools for neuro, cardiac and abdominal image and volume analysis.
• Matlab - A numerical computing environment commonly used in scientific computing, frequently for image processing. 
• IDL - A programming language that is commonly used for image analysis, processing and visualisation. 

Volume reconstruction and rendering

• X-TRACT - An X-Ray science imaging tool which supports image analysis and volume reconstruction for phase contrast imaging.  Developed by CSIRO X-Ray Science and Instrumentation.
• Insight Tool (ITK) - An open-source software toolkit for performing registration and segmentation. It supports aligning of multi-modal data.
• Seg3D - Visualisation and segmentation of biological volumes.
• VolView - Visualisation and rendering of volume data.
• Drishti - Colour, render, cut, slice, explore and animate a volume and then prepare images and videos for presentation and publication.  Developed by the ANU Vizlab.

Tools and libraries for large-scale and distributed visualisation

• Visualisation Toolkit (VTK) - An open source graphics toolbox commonly used in academia and scientific visualisation. It supports parallel rendering.
• OpenDX - An open source package for data visualisation and analysis. It was originally produced by IBM as Visualisation Data Explorer.
• Visit - An open source visualisation tool developed for viewing tera-scale data sets. It allows users to view very large data sets interactively.
• ParaView - A visualisation toolkit built over VTK and providing the ability to visualise very large datasets across a cluster.
• Vis5D+ - A visualisation tool for volumetric scientific data.
• SciRun - A workflow environment for scientific computing and visualisation.
• ImageVis3D - An interactive visualisation and volume rendering environment for visualisation of very large data sets.
• MayaVi - Scientific visualisation tool built using the VTK.

Domain-specific visualisation and image processing libraries

• FSL - FMRIB Software Library
• FreeSurfer - Automated tools for reconstruction of the brain's cortical surface from structural MRI data.
• SPM - Statistical Parametric Mapping
• MedINRIA - Suite of tools for processing and analysis of magnetic resonance images including anatomical MRI, functional MRI, and diffusion tensor MRI.
• DtiStudio - Software for diffusion tensor image (DTI) computation and fiber tracking.