RENCI engagement center opens at Duke

Friday, May 2, 2008

Durham, NC -- All that’s missing are Tom Cruise, 3D and a polished ball with some unlucky person’s name on it. The rest is right out of the movie Minority Report, director Marilyn Lombardi likes to say, and it’s soon to be showing at a RENCI Center near you.

Lombardi is not a film auteur but director of the Duke “engagement center” on the first floor of the Telecom Building between Duke University Medical Center and West Campus. The center is one of several linked in a high-speed network to other institutions of higher education across North Carolina under the auspices of the nonprofit Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI).

Duke, along with North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina, is a founding member of RENCI. The state-supported centers are part of a grid that enables large data and media transfer and teleconferencing and are linked to each other and a national grid by a powerful research-computing center based at RENCI headquarters in Chapel Hill. (For more information, see the RENCI website: http://www.renci.org.)

RENCI is what Lombardi calls an “applied think tank.” Like the other RENCI centers, Duke’s will bring together in-house researchers, advanced visualization capabilities and a mission to build multidisciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration. After several months of planning and remodeling, the space officially opened in April and is already playing host to computational groups both local and national.

This month, the big app arrives in the form of a 13-foot by 5-foot, high-definition display wall fed by six high-definition projectors. Multiple users will be able to touch and move rendered objects, shrink and expand and zoom in and out of landscapes and otherwise manipulate images like a gang set loose on a 12.4 million pixel, projected iPhone screen.

Lombardi and her staff of computer scientists are interested in taking on research partners at Duke and can also offer qualified groups RENCI space for teleconferences and access to computing resources across the state. Contact information can be found on the RENCI site.