Prof Dermot Diamond and his team at the National Centre for Sensor Research in DCU, have been successful in securing a Quadro K5200 graphics card from NVIDIA through their Academic Hardware Grant Request to assist them in their research for the COMMON SENSE project. Professor Diamond said:

“One main focus of our research is to merge the digital world with the molecular world. To do this we rely heavily on our ability to produce very high quality rendered images from CAD (Computer Aided Design) packages to illustrate our latest system designs to our research partners.”

Speaking on the particularities of the sensors being developed by the COMMON SENSE project, Professor Diamond added:

“These systems are low-cost autonomous sensors designed for in-situ environmental monitoring, providing access to previously unobtainable data by increasing the temporal and spatial resolution issues associated with expensive probe type spot measurements. By sending the recorded data to the cloud we can provide unprecedented access to real time data over wide-scale deployment sites. We can detect and record the concentration of nutrients leading to eutrophication in marine and fresh waters, track gas concentrations in air samples, along with temperature and pressure measurements.”

The COMMON SENSE researchers at DCU would like to thank the NVIDIA team for their support in this research. This award will significantly reduce the computational time required for a full render (including lighting, liquids and transparencies) by 70%, and will result in a greater number of high quality rendered images and videos produced in a much shorter time frame.

Dr Margaret McCaul, Mr Eoghan McNamara and Prof Dermot Diamond at the National Centre for Sensor Research, Dublin City University, Ireland.