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The San Diego Supercomputer Center's (SDSC) TeraShake 2 earthquake dataset, which was converted into a visualization to help the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) show how parts of Southern California could shake like a bowl fully of jelly if it was hit by a 7.0+ earthquake, will serve as the data template for IEEE's 2006 Visualization Design Contest. In addition, SDSC will be hosting the visualization design contest data.

The 2006 IEEE Visualization Design Contest was created to encourage the comparison of novel and established visualization techniques, while providing benchmarks for the community and creating an exciting venue for discussion. The theme for this year's contest is "See What's Shaking."

"When I became co-chair for the visualization conference, my first concern was how to find a data set and set of actual scientific questions that would challenge the community and provide criteria for judging successful submissions," explains Russell Taylor, conference co-chair and research associate professor of computer science, physics and astronomy as well as applied and materials sciences at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "My second concern was how to provide access to the data set to visualization scientists around the world. SDSC provided superb and rapid solutions to each of these problems."

With nearly six petabytes of storage capacity, SDSC can ensure that even the most data-laden visualization can be easily stored and accessed. For this reason, SDSC is hosting 2006 IEEE Visualization Design Contest data.
The contest is in conjunction with the IEEE Visualization 2006 conference held Oct. 29 -- Nov.3, 2006 in Baltimore, Maryland. Deadline for Visualization Contest submissions is August 11, 2006.

About SDSC
In 2005, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) celebrates two decades of enabling international science and engineering discoveries through advances in computational science and high performance computing. Continuing this legacy into the era of cyberinfrastructure, SDSC is a strategic resource to academia and industry, providing leadership in Data Cyberinfrastructure, particularly with respect to data curation, management and preservation, data-oriented high-performance computing, and Cyberinfrastructure-enabled science and engineering. SDSC is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego and one of the founding sites of NSF's TeraGrid. For more information, see www.sdsc.edu.