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Visualization of Terascale Datasets with Impostors
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| The interactive visualization of large astrophysical datasets is a formidable challenge. Cosmological simulations performed on current
terascale facilities typically generate data sets up to 100 gigabytes in size. In order to understand the complex three dimensional
structure within these simulations, interactive visualization with rapid rotation and zooming is required, but handling this much data is
well beyond the capability of even current high end graphics workstations. The rendering can be performed on a parallel computer,
even the same facility on which the simulation was done, but the user typically is using such facilities remotely. Hence both the latency
and the bandwidth between the users workstation and the parallel machine preclude the possibility of interactive rendering. We will
use techniques from the computer graphics community such as ``impostors'' to overcome these latency and bandwidth hurdles.
Interactive high quality rendering can be performed by using the power of the parallel machine to construct texture-map
representations of pieces of the simulation, which can then be shipped to the graphics workstation, where the graphics hardware is
optimize to rotate such texture-maps in real time. We will implement this application within our parallel visualization and analysis
framework developed with support from a previous AISRP grant. This framework is currently being actively used in research on
galaxy formation and evolution, and is sufficiently extensible that it can be used in a variety of applications relevant to NASA from
planet formation simulations to catalogs of galaxies from large scale structure surveys. Hence data from all these sources can be
rendered in real-time 3D. |
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