In July, the US Department of Energy hosted its annual Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC 2011) conference in Denver, CO. Among the programmed events was a Visualization Night in which a three-person jury, and members of the audience at large, voted to determine the best of 23 submitted scientific visualization videos. WIRED has a good overview of the event and commentary on the winning entries. My personal top three are a rooftop mortar shell blast visualization from the DoD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program, a simulation of a magnitude 8 earthquake centered at Bombay Beach by the San Diego Supercomputing Center, and an aerodynamic analysis of wind turbine wakes from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. [via Neatorama]