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John Clyne and John Dennis
Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) is a powerful volume visualization technique for exploring complex three and four-dimensional scalar data sets. Unlike traditional surface-fitting approaches, which map volume data into geometric primitives and can thus benefit greatly from widely available commercial graphics hardware, computationally-expensive DVR is performed, with rare exception exclusively on the CPU. Fortunately DVR algorithms tend to parallelize readily and much prior work has been done to produce parallel volume renderers capable of visualizing static datasets in real-time. Our contribution to the field is a shared-memory implementation of a parallel rendering package that takes advantage of high-bandwidth networking and storage to deliver volume rendering of time-varying datasets at interactive rates. We discuss our experiences with the system on the SGI Origin2000 supercomputer.
Jean M. Favre, Rolf Walder, and Doris Folini
In the frame of astrophysical applications, Euler equations including source terms are solved numerically in two and three dimensions.The data are computed on a J90-cluster by an adaptive mesh code with a high degree of vectorization and parallelization. These time-dependent simulations impose very high visualization constraints. We use AVS/Express to integrate custom developments required for memory, CPU, graphics resources and remote data access imposed by the application. We present the implementation of the visualization environment on SGI workstations with our 512-Tbyte storage facility.
James Earl Johnson
VRML, the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, is heading for a browser near you. VRML promises a write once, view anywhere capability for visualizing the results of engineering and scientific calculations. The same results may be visualized on a multitude of platforms, locally or over the web, using familiar web browsers. The choice of platform determines the performance of the visualization while the format and functionality remains unchanged. Simulation results can be packaged in a VRML format file to be loaded by a browser. Alternatively, a Java applet can read an existing data format and inject the data into a running VRML browser.
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