The Homunculus Project at the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC)  focuses on the development of virtual reality and visualization technology to help scientists and engineers to better understand their computer software systems and data.  This project is a high performance computing (HPC), multi-dimensional virtual laboratory for construction, simulation, evaluation, perception, and comprehension of complex software systems and simulations.

This virtual reality interface provides a laboratory without walls in which scientists may enter and interact with the software systems, effectively becoming the ``little person in the brain of the machine.''  Hence the name.  Capabilities include tools that allow multi-dimensional visualization of computer programs and data flow within the computer, sampling and displaying of information at random points in the programs for diagnostics, reconfiguration of the software modules, and monitoring of the high performance computers performing the actual calculations.

Computer programs are represented in the Homunculus as dynamic, continuously varying graphical objects joined by multi-resolution information channels.  The operator uses an immersive virtual reality head-mounted display to view the structures that represent the programs, use virtual tools to locomote and navigate through the world, interact with the simulations, and monitor the behavior of any external physical system under software control.

Current visualization research projects include: visualization of complex 3D data sets; visualization of the formal specification of high integrity software systems; development of interfaces to Khoros Cantata; visualization of parallel programs in real time; multi-resolution representation of complex software and data in the immersive virtual environments; development of new, dynamic representations of software visual programs based on psychology methods and theories; real-time virtual sound synthesis algorithms; experiments with new locomotion devices and metaphors to better understand ways of movement in virtual environments; and, multi-resolution level of detail in 3D sound localization and spatial stabilization.  Future project will be studying the representation and visualization of artificial neural network systems.

Dr. Thomas P. Caudell
Group Leader
(505) 277-5637
tpc@eece.unm.edu