The SCI research group was founded in 1994 by Drs. Chris Johnson and Rob MacLeod along with five graduate students. In 1996, we became the Center for Scientific Computing and Imaging and in 2000, the SCI Institute. The Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute is now one of eight permanent research institutes at the University of Utah and home to nearly 200 faculty, students, and staff. The 15 tenure-track faculty are drawn primarily from the School of Computing, Department of Bioengineering, and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and virtually all faculty have adjunct appointments in other, largely medical, departments. Recent growth in the SCI Institute has come in part from the award in 2007 from the state of Utah of a USTAR (Utah Science and Technology Advanced Research) cluster in Imaging Technology. This allowed the Institute to recruit fournew faculty in image analysis: Professors Guido Gerig, Tom Fletcher, Tolga Tasdizen, and Orly Alter. During this same time period, we were also able to recruit Professor Valerio Pascucci in visualization and Professor Juliana Freire in scientific data management.
Over the past decade, the SCI Institute has established itself as an internationally recognized leader in visualization, scientific computing, and image analysis applied to a broad range of application domains. The overarching research objective is to conduct application-driven research in the creation of new scientific computing techniques, tools, and systems. An important application focus of the Institute continues to be biomedicine, however, SCI Institute researchers also address challenging computational problems in a variety of application domains such as manufacturing, defense, and energy. SCI Institute research interests generally fall into different areas: scientific visualization, scientific computing and numerics, image processing and analysis, and scientific software environments. SCI Institute researchers also apply many of the above computational techniques within their own particular scientific and engineering sub-specialties, such as fluid dynamics, biomechanics, electrophysiology, bioelectric fields, parallel computing, inverse problems, and neuroimaging.
The SCI Institute either directs or is associated with several national research centers: the NIH Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing (CIBC), the DoE Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies (VACET), the NIH National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC), the DoE Scientific Data Management Center, the NIH Center for Computational Biology, and the DoE Center for the Simulation of Accidental Fires and Explosions (C-SAFE). In July, 2008, SCI was chosen as one of three NVIDIA Centers of Excellence in the U.S. (University of Illinois and Harvard University are the other two NVIDIA Centers).
A particular hallmark of SCI Institute research is the development of innovative and robust software packages, including the SCIRun scientific problem solving environment, Seg3D, ImageVis3D, VisTrails, and map3d. All these packages are broadly available to the scientific community under open source licensing and supported by web pages, documentation, and users groups.
The academic programs available for students are outstanding. The School of Computing has collaborated with faculty in the SCI Institute to create a graduate degree in Computing, which offers tracks in Scientific Computing and Graphics (Image Analysis is planned). The physical infrastructure is also outstanding with many large-scale computing facilities at the disposal of students and trainees, perhaps most exciting is the new NVIDIA computing cluster, which, along with a new graduate course in Parallel Programming for GPUs, provides opportunities for developing unique expertise in large-scale streaming architectures. SCI faculty also provide leadership in developing educational and research tracks in biomedical engineering through the Bioengineeeing Department. There are undergraduate and graduate tracks in computing and imaging, in part created and directed by SCI faculty. There is also a graduate track in cardiac electrophysiology and biophysics, directed by SCI faculty and supported through collaboration between SCI and the Cardiovascular Research and Training Institute (CVRTI).
Associated research centers
The SCI Institute houses the NIH/NCRR Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing (CIBC)[1] and is associated with several other national research centers:
- DoE Center for the Simulation of Accidental Fires and Explosions (C-SAFE)
- DoE Visualization and Analytics Center for Enabling Technologies (VACET)
- DoE Scientific Data Management Center
- DoE Center for Technology for Advanced Scientific Component Software (TASCS)
- NIH National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC)
- NIH Center for Computational Biology.
Open source software releases
Besides research in the areas mentioned above, a particular focus of SCI has been to develop innovative and robust software packages, and release them as open source. Examples:
- SCIRun, a scientific problem solving environment (PSE) for modeling, simulation and visualization of scientific problems (includes BioPSE);
- BioTensor, a program to process and visualize diffusion tensor images;
- Seg3D, an interactive segmentation tool;
- map3d, a scientific visualization application written to display and edit complex, three-dimensional geometric models and scalar, time-based data associated with those models;
- ImageVis3D, a lightweight, feature-rich volume rendering application; and
- VisTrails,[2] a new scientific workflow management system.