7 research outputs found
Interactive Visualization of the Largest Radioastronomy Cubes
3D visualization is an important data analysis and knowledge discovery tool,
however, interactive visualization of large 3D astronomical datasets poses a
challenge for many existing data visualization packages. We present a solution
to interactively visualize larger-than-memory 3D astronomical data cubes by
utilizing a heterogeneous cluster of CPUs and GPUs. The system partitions the
data volume into smaller sub-volumes that are distributed over the rendering
workstations. A GPU-based ray casting volume rendering is performed to generate
images for each sub-volume, which are composited to generate the whole volume
output, and returned to the user. Datasets including the HI Parkes All Sky
Survey (HIPASS - 12 GB) southern sky and the Galactic All Sky Survey (GASS - 26
GB) data cubes were used to demonstrate our framework's performance. The
framework can render the GASS data cube with a maximum render time < 0.3 second
with 1024 x 1024 pixels output resolution using 3 rendering workstations and 8
GPUs. Our framework will scale to visualize larger datasets, even of Terabyte
order, if proper hardware infrastructure is available.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, Accepted New Astronomy July 201
Ray Tracing Structured AMR Data Using ExaBricks
Structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement (Structured AMR) enables simulations to
adapt the domain resolution to save computation and storage, and has become one
of the dominant data representations used by scientific simulations; however,
efficiently rendering such data remains a challenge. We present an efficient
approach for volume- and iso-surface ray tracing of Structured AMR data on
GPU-equipped workstations, using a combination of two different data
structures. Together, these data structures allow a ray tracing based renderer
to quickly determine which segments along the ray need to be integrated and at
what frequency, while also providing quick access to all data values required
for a smooth sample reconstruction kernel. Our method makes use of the RTX ray
tracing hardware for surface rendering, ray marching, space skipping, and
adaptive sampling; and allows for interactive changes to the transfer function
and implicit iso-surfacing thresholds. We demonstrate that our method achieves
high performance with little memory overhead, enabling interactive high quality
rendering of complex AMR data sets on individual GPU workstations
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Query-Driven Visualization of Time-Varying Adaptive Mesh Refinement Data
The visualization and analysis of AMR-based simulations is integral to the process of obtaining new insight in scientific research. We present a new method for performing query-driven visualization and analysis on AMR data, with specific emphasis on time-varying AMR data. Our work introduces a new method that directly addresses the dynamic spatial and temporal properties of AMR grids which challenge many existing visualization techniques. Further, we present the first implementation of query-driven visualization on the GPU that uses a GPU-based indexing structure to both answer queries and efficiently utilize GPU memory. We apply our method to two different science domains to demonstrate its broad applicability
Abstract GPU-Assisted Raycasting for Cosmological Adaptive Mesh Refinement Simulations
In the recent years the advent of powerful graphics hardware with flexible, programmable fragment shaders enabled interactive raycasting implementations which perform the ray-integration on a per-pixel basis. Unlike slicebased volume rendering these approaches do not suffer from rendering artifacts caused by varying sample distances along different ray-directions or limited frame-buffer precision. They further allow a direct realization of sophisticated optical models. In this paper we investigate the applicability of GPU-assisted raycasting to block-structured, locally refined grids. We present an interactive algorithm for artifact-free, high-quality rendering of data defined on this type of grid structure and apply it to render data of time-dependent, three-dimensional galaxy and star formation simulations. We use a physically motivated emission-absorption model to map the computed temperature and density fields to color and opacity. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation–Vieweing Algorithms I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism– Raytracin