Visualizing DIII-D Tokarnak Magnetic Field Lines

We demonstrate the use of a combination of perceptually effective techniques for visualizing magnetic field data from the DIII-D Tokamak. These techniques can be implemented to run very efficiently on machines with hardware support for OpenGL. Interactive speeds facilitate clear communication of magnetic field structure, enhancing fusion scientists' understanding of their data, and thereby accelerating their research

Enabling Technologies for Petascale Electromagnetic Accelerator Simulation

The SciDAC2 accelerator project at SLAC aims to simulate an entire three-cryomodule radio frequency (RF) unit of the International Linear Collider (ILC) main Linac. Petascale computing resources supported by advances in Applied Mathematics (AM) and Computer Science (CS) and INCITE Program are essential to enable such very large-scale electromagnetic accelerator simulations required by the ILC Global Design Effort. This poster presents the recent advances and achievements in the areas of CS/AM through collaborations

Design and Optimization of Large Accelerator Systems through High-Fidelity Electromagnetic Simulations

SciDAC1, with its support for the 'Advanced Computing for 21st Century Accelerator Science and Technology' (AST) project, witnessed dramatic advances in electromagnetic (EM) simulations for the design and optimization of important accelerators across the Office of Science. In SciDAC2, EM simulations continue to play an important role in the 'Community Petascale Project for Accelerator Science and Simulation' (ComPASS), through close collaborations with SciDAC CETs/Institutes in computational science. Existing codes will be improved and new multi-physics tools will be developed to model large accelerator systems with unprecedented realism and high accuracy using computing resources at petascale. These tools aim at targeting the most challenging problems facing the ComPASS project. Supported by advances in computational science research, they have been successfully applied to the International Linear Collider (ILC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in High Energy Physics (HEP), the JLab 12-GeV Upgrade in Nuclear Physics (NP), as well as the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) and the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) in Basic Energy Sciences (BES)

Collaborative Visualization for Large-Scale Accelerator Electromagnetic Modeling

In the Phase I SBIR we proposed a ParaView-based solution to provide an environment for individuals to actively collaborate in the visualization process. The technical objectives of Phase I were: (1) to determine the set of features required for an effect collaborative system; (2) to implement a two-person collaborative prototype; and (3) to implement key collaborative features such as control locking and annotation. Accordingly, we implemented a ParaView-based collaboration prototype with support for collaborating with up to four simultaneous clients. We also implemented collaborative features such as control locking, chatting, annotation etc. Due to in part of the flexibility provided by the ParaView framework and the design features implemented in the prototype, we were able to support collaboration with multiple views, instead of a simple give as initially proposed in Phase I. In this section we will summarize the results we obtained during the Phase I project. ParaView is complex, scalable, client-server application framework built on top of the VTK visualization engine. During the implementation of the Phase I prototype, we realized that the ParaView framework naturally supports collaboration technology; hence we were able to go beyond the proposed Phase I prototype in several ways. For example, we were able to support for multiple views, enable server-as well as client-side rendering, and manage up to four heterogeneous clients. The success we achieved with Phase I clearly demonstrated the technical feasibility of the ParaView based collaborative framework we are proposing in the Phase II effort. We also investigated using the web browser as one of the means of participating in a collaborative session. This would enable non-visualization experts to participate in the collaboration process without being intimidated by a complex application such as ParaView. Hence we also developed a prototype web visualization applet that makes it possible for interactive visualization over the web

Hierarchichal Perspective Volume Rendering using Triangle Fans

We present a method of accelerated perspective volume rendering using cell projection, triangle fans, and a data hierarchy. The hierarchy allows mixed resolution rendering, greatly increasing speed. We utilize triangle fans for addditional speed and texture mapped opacity for accuracy

Anisotropic Volume Rendering for Extremely Dense, Thin Line Data

Many large scale physics-based simulations which take place on PC clusters or supercomputers produce huge amounts of data including vector fields. While these vector data such as electromagnetic fields, fluid flow fields, or particle paths can be represented by lines, the sheer number of the lines overwhelms the memory and computation capability of a high-end PC used for visualization. Further, very dense or intertwined lines, rendered with traditional visualization techniques, can produce unintelligible results with unclear depth relationships between the lines and no sense of global structure. Our approach is to apply a lighting model to the lines and sample them into an anisotropic voxel representation based on spherical harmonics as a preprocessing step. Then we evaluate and render these voxels for a given view using traditional volume rendering. For extremely large line based datasets, conversion to anisotropic voxels reduces the overall storage and rendering for O(n) lines to O(1) with a large constant that is still small enough to allow meaningful visualization of the entire dataset at nearly interactive rates on a single commodity PC

Scalable Self-Orienting Surfaces: A Compact, Texture-Enhanced Representation for Interactive Visualization Of 3D Vector Fields

This paper presents a study of field line visualization techniques. To address both the computational and perceptual issues in visualizing large scale, complex, dense field line data commonly found in many scientific applications, a new texture-based field line representation which we call selforienting surfaces is introduced. This scalable representation facilitates hardware-accelerated rendering and incorporation of various perceptually-effective techniques, resulting in intuitive visualization and interpretation of the data under study. An electromagnetic data set obtained from accelerator modeling and a fluid flow data set from aerodynamics modeling are used for evaluation and demonstration of the techniques