April '07 Newsletter

Old Islamic tile patterns that embody new math are brought to life by CITRIS artists, architects, and engineers. The Noor Project bridges cultures and centuries, shedding light on the geometric principles underlying these ancient patterns and giving them new expression in animated modern art and architecture.<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

by <!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature1Author" -->Gordy Slack<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

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(Steve Beck will present his NOOR Project at the May 2 Research Exchange at noon in 540 Cory Hall)

While the Golden Age of Islam’s mosaic tile patterns may be centuries past, a CITRIS project is revealing them to be very relevant today. A year ago, electronic artist, entrepreneur, and technologist Steve Beck and his chief collaborator, UC Berkeley computer science professor Carlo Séquin, launched NOOR, a project exploring the mathematics and geometry underlying these intricate, mesmerizing patterns. NOOR is part of the larger art and technology research program FIAT LUX, which aims to study the integration of art, science and culture.

In both Farsi and Arabic, the word NOOR means light, and though the project has many aims, chief among them, says Beck, is to illuminate and pay homage to the great Islamic scientists, artists, and mathematicians whose work spanned from the 7th to the 12th century.

NOOR draws explicit connections between the power of Islamic artwork and the math that underlies it. The researchers hope it will shed light on the depth and sophistication of an ancient culture, says collaborator Nezar AlSayyad, Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley, and is part of the world cultural inclusion that is a major character of the University.

Beck is best known for his seminal video art, music, and light sculptures, some of which transform traditional themes—such as Native American weaving patterns—into animated light displays. His video art is in the collections of such institutes as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum. Beck, who received his Berkeley EECS degree in 1971, is currently a visiting fellow in the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley and also an Executive in Residence at UC Berkeley’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology.

Séquin, a world-renowned expert in computer graphics who has long been using computers to design complex sculptural forms, says that the project “employs sophisticated generative algorithms to demonstrate how some of the intricate patterns may have evolved from simple line-and-circle drawings.”

The project pays homage to the profound thinkers and mathematicians of centuries ago, says Beck, but it is also an exploration of very modern themes.

The February 23, 2007, issue of Science, for example, featured an article about recursive Islamic tile patterns known as girih, which embody a mathematical principle known as the quasi-crystal. Quasi-crystals generate patterns composed of a finite set of interlocking units, but never repeat even if tiled infinitely in all directions. Though only described by Western mathematicians in the 1960s, quasi-crystals were perfectly expressed in tiling patterns laid down 500 years ago in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, for example, according to the article in Science.

Beck, Séquin, and their collaborators are using the underlying algorithmic principles embodied in these designs to create giant, animated light emitting diode (LED) sculptures elaborating and amplifying their mathematical themes. They will employ the displays as architectural elements in new buildings or as sculptural accouterments inside or outside of existing ones. “We are very close to securing our first commission,” says Beck.

One of the giant animated LED displays, shown at the Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium (BEARS).

LED displays are energy efficient, long lasting, bright, and very adaptable, says Beck. They can be easily attached to the outside of buildings or other structures creating bright, lively, ever-changing skins.

“The original tile patterns are pretty much set in time by the nature of the medium,” says Beck. “We are introducing a temporal dimension to the patterns by animating them.” Adding the dimension of time will unlock and illuminate some of their mathematical and geometric themes, he says.

The patterns, which emerged over centuries as highly stylized or geometrized calligraphic expressions of Qur’anic passages, are still considered sacred in the Islamic world. Beck is working closely with Middle Eastern scholars, including AlSayyad, to ensure that none of the images are inadvertently used in irreverent ways.

“These patterns are not just abstract mathematical expressions,” says Séquin. “They mean many things to different people, which is one reason they are so potent.”

The developers are hoping to install projects in UC Berkeley’s Soda Hall, the new CITRIS Headquarters building, and in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza. A PBS-TV documentary exploring the historical, mathematical, and cultural aspects of the Islamic patterns is also in the works, says Beck.

Like Beck, Séquin has a love for mathematical geometry and says he believes that math and art have a close evolutionary relationship. “One of the first applications of emerging mathematical or geometrical concepts may have been to make repetitive frieze or patterns fit seamlessly around a bone or a clay pot,” Séquin says. “Once some mathematical principles were clarified and expressed they helped artists make still more complex and beautiful patterns, which inspired more mathematical speculation and articulation.”

Carlo Séquin, Robert Birgeneau, and Steve Beck.

Such a “feedback loop” between art and math may have played an important role in the evolution of the human brain and culture, speculates Beck.

To examine what makes these patterns resonate, NOOR will look at their effect on the retina, optic nerve, and visual cortex. Beck is in conversation with Stephen Palmer, director of UC Berkeley’s Visual Perception Lab. In addition to the physiological effects, Beck also wants to study the psychological impact of viewing the geometric patterns.

In the same way that Islamic leaders chose to decorate their mosques and palaces with these patterns to inspire awe and reverence, Beck and Séquin suspect that putting such geometrically evocative sculptures around computer science, math, and engineering students will help them to internalize the logos and beauty of the forms.

“By presenting images pertinent to mathematics, science, and engineering we hope to trigger perceptions—maybe subconscious ones—that would have a favorable effect,” says Beck. “Not to mention the aesthetic enhancement of these areas. These things are really beautiful.”

A. Richard Newton, Executive Producer (In Memoriam), was instrumental in getting the project off the ground by introducing Beck to Khalid Alireza (M.S. in IEOR, UCB ’71) in October 2006. Part of Alireza’s company, Xenel International USA—based in Westlake Village, CA—added a $50,000 seed grant to an in-kind gift in support of the NOOR research of $90,000 from Beck-Tech Corp. in Berkeley. (No University or public funds have been used for this research.)

Though NOOR introduces a temporal element into otherwise static patterns by animating them, the project still deals with the timeless truths of both geometry and aesthetic beauty, says Séquin. Unlike much contemporary conceptual art, art made from geometric principles will always be recognized as beautiful and important, Séquin says, even if re-discovered thousands of years from now.

If beauty is truth, and if truth is practical, then these patterns may even eventually be useful in the development of CMOS semiconductor devices, nanotechnology, and MEMS, a possibility NOOR will also explore, says Beck.

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For more information:

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Contact Steve Beck:

http://www.stevebeck.tv

http://media.coe.berkeley.edu/CET/index.php?title=People:_Steve_Beck

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/BEARS/open-house/07noor.shtml

http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/engnews/Spring07/EN09S/pattern.html

Petascale computing is coming of age, opening powerful new modeling opportunities for CITRIS applications. From the exploration of protein folding at the atomic level to long-range climate predictions and turbulence studies, the new computers will give a broad range of users processing power heretofore reserved for weapons research.<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

by <!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Feature2Author" -->Gordy Slack<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

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CITRIS researchers will soon have access to a new generation of high-performance supercomputers far more powerful than those available today. Known as petascale computers, these new machines will be capable of conducting 10^15 floating-point operations per second (petaflops). These parallel machines may employ more than a million processors and will be able to handle huge data sets. Until now, they have been mainly the domain of military and other national security applications. With the delivery of a new petascale computer to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and with the possibility of a Berkeley team helping to host another one at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), researchers working on climate analysis, genomics, environmental monitoring, protein analysis, earthquake, nanoscience, and other CITRIS-related fields will gain access to powerful new modeling tools within the next four years.

By employing a much higher resolution of analysis, seismologists here, for instance, will be able to do block-by-block modeling of earthquakes at different intensities, according to James Demmel, Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at UC Berkeley and founding Chief Scientist at CITRIS.

James Demmel, CITRIS founding Chief Scientist.

"Until now, models have said, 'this huge area will vibrate about like this.' But that is not good enough to figure out which buildings need which kinds of retrofitting," says Demmel. "But with a petascale machine, you can refine the resolution of your simulations to determine which blocks and buildings are especially endangered and how best to retrofit them. It would enable a science-based approach to earthquake preparedness and response."

The world of huge parallel computers on the petascale has arrived. If past is indeed prelude and speed increases continue at current rates, within a decade, at least half of the world's 500 fastest computers will probably be petascale.

Access to such processing power will allow researchers in the health and life sciences to engineer proteins down to the atomic level, opening new doors to the treatment of several types of diseases. Climate analysis is another key field where petascale simulation will lead to much better modeling, enabling science-based approaches to emissions policy or to predicting the effects of global warming on air quality, agriculture, wildfires, and water supplies.

Scientists studying energy production and efficiency will also get new tools, permitting heretofore over-complex modeling of turbulence conditions and other factors that determine fuel efficiency, for instance, or the design of bio-fuels.

Before these new giants can be fully exploited, some big challenges must first be addressed. UC Berkeley computer science professor Katherine Yelick is working with colleagues in the Parallelism Lab to bring such CITRIS-type applications and the petascale hardware and systems software together.
UCB computer science professor Katherine Yelick."We are trying to expose the best features of the underlying hardware to the software," says Yelick. "The hardware designers are trying to innovate and put in fast networks or networks with very interesting connectivity patterns, and we want to take full advantage of that," she says.

Yelick has one foot in the world of system-level software and the other in that of hardware development, which makes her particularly valuable to the coordination effort. She and her team have developed new compilers and programming languages (one based on C and another based on Java) for the new petascale computers.

One big challenge is the problem of pacing and managing the information flow through hundreds of thousands of processors. "It is like trying to get a million people coordinated and doing their jobs at exactly the same time," says Yelick.

Petascale machines not only have more chips, but each chip has more processors than earlier generation supercomputers. Coordinating the flow and sharing of so much activity is a job requiring new algorithms and new approaches to applications programming, too, says Yelick.

This is a big problem because the work the computer is trying to do is not equally distributed among all of its processors. In modeling weather, for example, the Earth's surface can be divided into equal sized parts, and each given a dedicated processor. But if there is a hail storm somewhere, for example, there will suddenly be a lot of significant activity in the processors associated with those parts of the model. If the rest of the system has to wait for the processors working on the hailstorm, it can lose a lot of time, says Yelick.

In addition to such load imbalance issues, the team is working to minimize the time it takes for information to travel around these computers, some of which can be as big as a tennis court.

"Light travels pretty slowly," explains Demmel. "if processors on opposite sides of the computer have to send huge amounts of information back and forth, the time adds up fast."

Racks of servers at UCSC.

While Yelick straddles the gap between the systems-level programming and hardware design, Demmel straddles that between the applied math and the applications-level programming. "People who can work across one or more of those boundaries are very important in making these kinds of projects hang together," says Yelick.

People like Yelick and Demmel are finding themselves thrust from the rarified theoretical atmosphere of the high-end research computer world to what will soon be the center of a revolution in personal computing. As personal computers are forced to embrace parallel processors, they will face some of the same challenges as these high-end scientific computers.

In addition to the NSF bid to design and host a new peta computer for LLNL, Demmel and Yelick are just now completing another proposal for an Intel- and Microsoft-funded center for studying parallel computing applications for personal computers, games, hand-held devices and other commercial products.

"Now that Moore's Law can no longer be met by making single chips faster, everything is going to have to be parallel," says Demmel. "The computer industry will hit a wall unless it figures out how to deal with large-scale parallelism."