John Hart

Ph.D. University of Illinois at Chicago, 1991

Research Statement

The personal computer has advanced to become a very powerful individual supercomputer, and we are developing new tools to allow both scientists and home users to harness its power. For example, with the support of the NSF, NVidia, Microsoft and ATI, we have reprogrammed graphics cards originally designed for videogames to generate movie-quality graphics and to accelerate scientific computing applications. Also with the support of the NSF and in collaboration with Purdue, U. Texas, UMBC and Stanford, we are reengineering the MPEG online movie file format to compress unsteady flow datasets to allow scientists and enthusiasts to quickly peruse with their home PC the warehouses of data output by today's high-performance simulations.

Computational topology is a new field that allows us to understand and control the connectivity of a structure. With the support of the NSF and DARPA and in collaboration with our Center for the Simulation of Advanced Rockets, we are investigating new methods for detecting and controlling moving interface surfaces, such as the burn of a rocket's solid fuel propellant. Also with the support of the NSF, we are building a data structure to represent the topological space of all unobstructed lines of sight in a scene which can assist in its photorealistic illumination.