Dr. Cutchin has Been with KAUST since November 2008. KAUST is situated in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia at 60 km north of Jeddah. Dr. Cutchin originally comes from the San Diego University of California (UCSD).

The KAUST campus will host 100 Faculty staff members and some 500 students. There will be 14 research centres and a phenomenal amount of things is going on to create a really innovative campus.

The Visualization Laboratory, currently under construction, will be the core laboratory. It serves all the academical departments. There are seven collaborative areas, two lecture halls and two DS2 systems.

Dr. Cutchin summed up the Cornea specifications, consisting in 48 quad-core CPUs with 24 cluster nodes. There will be capture of the sound and the video inside the cave which constitutes a unique capability. The team will have to wait whether it will work according to their expectations.

The facility will provide Virtual Reality; scientific visualization; content production; HPC visualization; remote visualization; and Virtual Reality audio.

Co-operator Talha Amin is hosted at UCSD. Alyn Rockwood is the mentor. He started June 15 and will be relocating August 5. He will be occupied with terrain models in Virtual Reality.

KAUST is a bold experiment, noted Dr. Cutchin. The KAUST team was keen on first finding partners before building the campus. The KAUST focus has always been on partnerships. KAUST is really kind of small but partnerships are important, Dr. Cutchin insisted. So far, KAUST has partnerships with IBM, UCSD, and Technische Universität München.

Partnerschips are 4 to 8 years in length and are formed in four or five year cycles. Currently, KAUST is still looking for partners to support the KAUST Outreach Programme. Host students and faculty from KAUST are located at partner facilities or on-site. They organize and participate in major conferences and events and enable direct contact and communication for students, faculty staff and partners.

Dr. Cutchin also mentioned the Cross Platform Cluster Graphics Library (CGLX) at UCSD and the HiperSpace Wall.

TelePresence with OptiPortal/OptiPresence is being constructed at KAUST. All large-scale tiled displays will be outfitted with OptiPortal/OptiPresence technology. It is used for viewing large data sets at multiple collaborative sites. TelePresence and International Network is necessary for exchange of information and data in real time and for global teleconferencing capability to directly engage with KAUST community partners globally.

The Shaheen supercomputer is of crucial importance for the Cornea visualization facility. Shaheen has been installed on site and the Cornea to Shaheen connectivity will be established for applications in the areas of molecular dynamics, reservoir simulation and cosmology simulation.

The challenges consist in tackling with HPC computational steering to optimize the network connectivity and establish a wider connectivity. Other goals to accomplish are to create interactive simulation mesh refinement for billion cell meshes; generate instrumentation packages for a variety of simulators; install sophisticated data sharing schemes for meshes and geometry; establish advanced VR interfaces for parameter adjustment; tackle

robustness challenges in all parts of the pipeline and looking for help with this; and to make the molecular dynamics simulation an early candidate.

Dr. Cutchin ended his talk by affirming that all KAUST students will be exposed to and trained in advanced visulization technologies, thus providing literacy in visualization. As a result, the KAUST gradates will have the skills to start new companies and create visualization labs within existing companies.

More information is available at the KAUST website.